CULTURE CURRENT-Stefan Fatsis on the words that defined 2025

By Yasmeen Serhan

Jan 10 - In an era of search engines and algorithm-inspired slang, dictionaries can seem like analog relics.

But for writer Stefan Fatsis — who spent time working for America’s oldest dictionary publisher, Merriam-Webster, while researching his new book “Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary” — they remain vital catalogs of language and, by extension, who we are as people.

Speaking from his home in Washington, D.C., Fatsis reflects on the thousands of words that were added to the lexicon in 2025, what they reveal about the year just passed, and the forces shaping language to come.

This conversation, conducted in December, has been edited for length and clarity.

Thousands of words and phrases were added to the dictionary in 2025. What do they tell us about the year just gone?

New additions to the dictionary always sum up incredibly well how we lived for the past year. The job of the dictionary is to be a window on society — it's to take what people are talking and writing about and assess and analyze it and then give it back to us in a digestible, understandable form.

Merriam-Webster's 2025 Word of the Year was "slop." The Oxford Dictionary's was "rage bait." What did you make of their choices?

Words of the year are a way to box up what's happened and try to make sense of the previous year. We are obsessed with, understandably, AI and the threats to the way that we go about doing our daily lives. Merriam-Webster picked "slop," an Australian dictionary, Macquarie, picked "AI slop." "Rage bait” (is) another reflection of where we are as a culture in terms of how we use the internet and social media, posting things deliberately to arouse angry reactions.

What I am a little surprised about is that they steered away from the chaos and the political tumult that we've experienced in America this past year. There were no words of the year about ICE or immigration or deportations. There were no words of the year about tariffs or the economy. We have seen dictionaries lean into those critical political moments in the last decade. And this year, for some reason, there was a reluctance to go there.

You embedded within Merriam-Webster as a lexicographer-in-training. What most surprised you about the process?

I defined about 90 words for its online dictionary; 14 of them so far have gotten into the dictionary. I defined words like "microaggression" and "safe space" and "alt-right" and less politically heavy words like "headbutt" and "dogpile" and "burkini" and "sheeple."

What impressed me the most is the academic rigor that lexicographers bring to what might seem like a fairly simple task of defining a word and entering it into a dictionary. It requires this painstaking research — combing databases, looking for great examples of language use, and then trying to put those together and parse what the meaning is of a word, and then also to look at words that have already been entered into the dictionary and see how they have evolved.

Can you walk us through the process of defining a word like "burkini"?

I spent hours looking through databases and assembling dozens of examples of usage of the word in mainstream publications ... painstakingly going through them to parse out the simple definition and then understand how a word is used politically, what the contexts are, and then trying to craft this very short partial sentence to help readers understand what something means.

Burkini was a very political word and the context in which it was used and the way that governments and people reacted to this article of clothing were politically laden, so I had to sift through that and try to write something that conveyed everything about the word. That's the goal when you're defining a word: to very clearly, concisely, and almost transparently explain to people what something means. Because you don't want a reader to think about the person writing a definition. What the lexicographer writes is supposed to look as if it's almost divinely created.

In “Unabridged,” you argue that dictionaries aren’t just records of language but cultural artifacts — “the spreadsheet of who we are as a people now and where we have been.” Which of 2025’s additions best illustrate that point?

Every word that's added to the dictionary says something about who we are as a people. If you just look at the ones that bubble up to the top for "Word of the Year,” you see that reflection of where we are.

One was "parasocial," which reflects how we care so much about celebrities that sometimes we think that we have relationships with them that aren't real. Or "rage bait" — we're living through angry times. Or something that seems frivolous like "six-seven," the tween slang with the accompanying hand gestures of moving your hands up and down. It's defined as meaning nothing, and people are upset that it's gotten so much traction. This is an internet-based phenomenon and it does reflect that tween culture can be annoying, but it's no different than hundreds of catchphrases and words and memes that we've deployed during our lifetimes.

How do dictionaries handle ephemeral slang like “six-seven”?

We've never lived in a time when words (have been) created so quickly and bubble up into culture so quickly because of the internet. And the goal then for the lexicographer is to find a way to transmit all of that information to the public.

One way that dictionaries like Merriam-Webster and Dictionary.com are doing that now is by creating a way station for words. They have slang verticals on their websites. It's a way of saying, "Hey, here's what's going on right now, but we're not going to put it in the actual dictionary yet because we still have standards.” And those standards include ensuring that words that we add have demonstrated some permanence in culture. We're being umpires here, but at the same time we want people to come to our websites because if we don't give them information, that's a click that we don't get.

Dictionaries are making business decisions at the same time that they're making linguistic decisions, and that can be a difficult needle to thread. You want to be on top of everything current and fun and interesting that people might be curious about, but at the same time you’ve got to do the foundational work to make sure that your dictionary is as clear and up to date for all words, not just new ones.

Do you see the rise of AI-generated text influencing the way we communicate?

How could it not be? When people look up a word these days, they're just going to type it into a search bar and what comes up is an AI overview. And that's probably going to be enough for most people. They don't need to scroll further down the page and find the link for Merriam-Webster or Dictionary.com or any other commercial dictionary product. So that's preventing people from going to these websites, which means less traffic, which means less revenue.

The challenge for a company like Merriam is to find new sources of revenue. And some ways that they have done that include putting more games on their website, sort of like newspapers have done. This is an era of diversification in a way to combat the mounting threat that AI poses.

Internally, AI is a challenge too because AI can write pretty good definitions. There's still problems with the way that AI approaches things like example sentences and etymologies, but generally, AI can write a perfectly passable definition of a word if you prompt it to write one in a good way. So this is going to be an existential problem for this business.

What would be the repercussions for American language and culture if this work disappeared?

The risk of this work disappearing, I think, is pretty grave. Language is who we are as a people. The way how we write, how we talk, how we communicate is an essential ingredient of who we are. Without it, we would be at a loss — not just historically, but in a contemporary way. In Merriam-Webster's building in Springfield, Massachusetts, there are more than 16 million slips of paper that document the history of American language. They were invaluable for me writing this book, and they've been invaluable for researchers studying language.

There's a deep abiding belief in the importance of ensuring that we have a reliable repository for language that we call dictionaries. And it would be, I think, a cultural crisis if we lost access to that or lost the ability to have these companies, these people, who compile language for us going forward.

The perspectives expressed in Culture Current are the subject’s own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Reuters News.