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For the second consecutive time, the Oxford English Dictionary crowned an internet-slang term its word of the year. This year’s choice—rizz—is meaningful only to the extent that it reminds us of the dictionary’s role as a responsive, living object.
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‘Here Lies Rizz’
The reason I know what rizz means is so inane, it’s not even worth getting into. It involves a TikTok video, and a tweet about the video, and an explainer article I read to try to decrypt the meaning of the sentence “Livvy rizzed him up; Livvy even hugged Baby Gronk” over the summer. Rizz, which refers to someone’s ability to flirt by being charismatic, was never a word I thought all that much about. But the fact that it was just crowned the word of the year by the Oxford English Dictionary is a reminder that a dictionary is a dynamic corpus, evolving right alongside language and capable of responding even to internet phenomena that are just entering the mainstream.
People tend to think of the dictionary as old and fusty, which is partly why the dissonance of seeing it address slang—the dictionary knows what rizz is?—makes us laugh. But the job of a good dictionary is to keep up closely with new interventions in how we talk. The selection of the word of the year differs a bit from a dictionary’s everyday work; Jonathan Dent, a senior editor at Oxford English Dictionary, described it in an email as a chance to “take a snapshot of a particular aspect of language use,” noting that it remains to be seen whether rizz “sticks around long enough” to make it into the OED’s dictionaries. The project of naming a word of the year highlights the dictionary’s role as a descriptive project rather than a prescriptive one, my colleague Caleb Madison, The Atlantic’s crossword editor (who has worked at OED), told me.
Especially in the digital age, dictionaries have many tools to trace how people use language. Because language changes so quickly on the internet, those who compile and update the dictionary turn to the public for information: What words are people searching for, or using in online conversations? That participation is literal during the selection process for the word of the year: Since 2022, OED has asked the public to narrow down a provided shortlist of words of the year to four finalists, before editors make the ultimate call. Think of a dictionary less like a natural-history museum and more like a zoo, Caleb suggests. Its role is not just to teach us about the past and what is settled but to explore what is happening now, in the wild.
Rizz emerged on internet and gaming platforms before it seeped out toward a wider audience (Tom Holland seemingly helped matters by using the word in an interview). The word is distinctive for linguistic reasons: abbreviations are not usually pulled from the middle of a longer word. Rizz, which is derived from the word charisma, joins the small but distinguished company of words such as fridge in this regard. Also, Caleb noted, “a double-Z ending is funny and fun to say.” (Z, he added, is a 10-point Scrabble letter.) Other organizations have taken notice: Rizz was a runner-up for the American Dialect Society’s word of the year in 2022, losing out to the suffix -ussy. In September of this year, Merriam-Webster announced that it had added rizz to its dictionary, alongside goated, cromulent, and bussin’, and it also noted rizz as one of the year’s top words.
For decades now, dictionaries have been naming words of the year in an apparent effort to capture the zeitgeist and get people talking about words (OED began doing so in 2004). Reading a list of past OED words of the year offers a portal to moments in language: We can recall a recent era when terms such as GIF and podcast felt novel. Sometimes, the words capture the dominant political tensions of the time: climate emergency in 2019, and post-truth in 2016. In 2020, no single word was chosen, and in 2021 it was vax. Last year, the term was borrowed from internet culture too: goblin mode. As Caleb wrote at the time, going “goblin mode” is to look inward and indulge our private weirdness. “As we emerge from our caves after that long hibernation, our goblin-selves lurk somewhere deep inside us, beckoning us back home to vibe out,” he wrote. This year’s term (along with finalists such as Swiftie and situationship) is more social and reliant on turning toward others, perhaps a reflection of a shifting societal mood.
A dictionary is not prescriptive, but the word-of-the-year designation can help reify a word’s presence in popular culture. It can also risk making it uncool. Slang terms inherently run counter to mainstream vocabulary and the lexicon of those in power, but crowning something the word of the year thrusts it further into common parlance. Rizz, used online by Gen Z—and even the next generation, Gen Alpha—has now been pushed into the consciousness of people who read the dictionary (as well as news reports, and newsletters like this one). The word of the year provides a temperature check on how people are using language—or, at least, how the people who work at the dictionary see us using language, Caleb said. But when it comes to a slang term’s cool factor, he said, “I tend to think of it as a gravestone … Here lies rizz.”
Related:
- We’re all capable of going “goblin mode.”
- Why AI doesn’t get slang
Today’s News
- The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Moore v. United States, which could have sweeping ramifications on the American tax system.
- Israeli troops have entered Khan Younis, Hamas’s last major stronghold in Gaza. Tens of thousands of residents have fled amid a deepening humanitarian crisis.
- The presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania testified before the House regarding anti-Semitic and Islamophobic incidents on their campuses since October 7.
Dispatches
- The Weekly Planet: The United Nations climate summit is the one place the countries suffering most from climate change can face down the countries causing it, Zoë Schlanger writes.
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Evening Read
Ammon Bundy Has Disappeared
By Jacob Stern
Two weeks before chaos hit St. Luke’s hospital in Boise, Idaho—before Ammon Bundy showed up with an armed mob and the hospital doors had to be sealed and death threats crashed the phone lines—a 10-month-old baby named Cyrus Anderson arrived in the emergency room.
The boy’s parents, Marissa and Levi, knew something wasn’t right: For months, Cyrus had been having episodes of vomiting that wouldn’t stop. When he arrived in the ER, he weighed just 14 pounds, which put him in the .05th percentile for his age. Natasha Erickson, the doctor who examined him, had seen malnutrition cases like this in textbooks but never in real life. Cyrus’s ribs were clearly visible through his chest. When he threw up, his vomit was bright green.
Erickson hooked the baby up to an IV and a feeding tube, and he slowly started to gain weight. But Levi and Marissa were anxious to leave. They were members of an anti-government activist network that Bundy, the scion of America’s foremost far-right family, had founded, and they shared his distrust of medical and public-health authorities.
Read the full article.
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Culture Break
Listen. Forty years ago, scientists turned the tide in the roach wars. Why doesn’t anyone remember? Daniel Engber and Hanna Rosin discuss in the latest episode of Radio Atlantic.
Watch. A new documentary about the pioneering sex researcher Shere Hite (in theaters) points to the barriers that women face when writing candidly about intimacy and power.
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Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.
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