A term coined by one of the brightest minds in artificial intelligence has been officially named Collins Dictionary’s Word of the Year for 2025. “Vibe coding,” first articulated by Andrej Karpathy, a founding engineer at OpenAI and former AI director at Tesla, has been recognized for its rapid integration into the global lexicon, reflecting a new era of human-machine collaboration.
Karpathy introduced the term in February to describe a revolutionary method of software development. Instead of meticulous, line-by-line programming, “vibe coding” involves giving an AI a natural language prompt—a “vibe”—which the AI then translates into functional code. Karpathy suggested this could empower creators to build applications while barely acknowledging the underlying code.
Lexicographers at Collins, who continuously monitor a 24-billion-word corpus of language from media sources, noted a “huge increase” in the term’s usage. Its selection highlights a significant cultural and technological pivot. Alex Beecroft, Collins’ managing director, stated that the word “perfectly captures how language is evolving alongside technology” and signals a “seamless integration of human creativity and machine intelligence.”
This new AI-driven term beat out several other notable words, many of which also touched on themes of technology and modern anxiety. Among the contenders was “clanker,” a popular derogatory term for AI and robots derived from Star Wars. Its viral spread on social media underscores a public undercurrent of frustration and distrust toward the very technologies enabling “vibe coding.”
The tech-heavy list was rounded out by “broligarchy,” a critical moniker for the tech elite, and “biohacking,” the pursuit of optimized health. The list also included social and economic terms like “aura farming” (cultivating a cool persona), “Henry” (high earner, not rich yet), “glaze” (excessive praise), and “taskmasking” (faking work).