6-7, rizz and rage bait: decoding the words of the year
Every year the big English dictionaries each pick a Word of the Year, and lately the winners come from TikTok and AI. This quiz covers the winners announced for 2023 to 2025: what they mean, where they came from and who picked them. The explanations also show how the dictionaries choose, mostly from search and usage data, with a public vote at Oxford.
Questions
- Not answered. In 2025, a student answers "How was the test?" with "6-7" and a palms-up hand gesture. What do they mean?
- Not answered. Where did "6-7" come from?
- Not answered. Why is NBA player LaMelo Ball part of the 6-7 story?
- Not answered. Dictionary.com named "67" its 2025 Word of the Year. What evidence showed its editors that the number itself was trending?
- Not answered. In 2025, many schools told students to stop saying "6-7". Why?
- Not answered. Which longer word was shortened to give us "rizz"?
- Not answered. In which year did Oxford name "rizz" its Word of the Year?
- Not answered. Oxford's 2024 Word of the Year was first recorded in Henry David Thoreau's Walden (1854). Type the two-word term.
- Not answered. A cooking video puts ketchup on carbonara, and the creator hopes angry comments will push it into more feeds. Which term, Oxford's 2025 Word of the Year, describes it?
- Not answered. Cambridge Dictionary's 2025 Word of the Year is parasocial. Which of these relationships is parasocial?
- Not answered. Merriam-Webster chose slop as its 2025 Word of the Year. Which meaning earned it the title?
- Not answered. Collins picked vibe coding as its Word of the Year for 2025. What does it describe?
- Not answered. Andrej Karpathy coined vibe coding in a February 2025 post. What did the post describe?
- Not answered. Which of these won Word of the Year at a major English dictionary in 2025?
- Not answered. Which 2025 winners did their dictionaries link to AI when announcing them?
- Not answered. Decode this group-chat message. Which definitions fit?