Sorry, Swifties. The Gen Z slang term — derived from “charisma” — went viral this year after the actor Tom Holland claimed to have none.
It’s official. Oxford University Press, the world’s second-oldest academic press and the publisher of the Oxford English Dictionary, has rizz.
Or at least, like the rest of us over a certain age, it’s trying to get some. “Rizz” — Gen Z (or is it Gen Alpha?) slang for “style, charm or attractiveness,” or “the ability to attract a romantic or sexual partner” — has been named as Oxford’s 2023 Word of the Year, beating out contenders like situationship, prompt, de-influencing and (yes) Swiftie.
“Rizz” was first recorded in 2022, according to Oxford. But it went viral in June, after the actor Tom Holland, in an interview with Buzzfeed, said: “I have no rizz whatsoever. I have limited rizz.”
That spawned a crush of memes, as overall usage surged by a factor of about 15 over the previous year, according to Oxford’s data. Casper Grathwohl, the president of Oxford Languages, the dictionary division, said that this year’s choice reflects the way social media has increased the pace of language change exponentially. Plus, he said, the word simply has … rizz.
“One of the reasons it’s moving from being a niche social media phrase into the mainstream is, it’s just fun to say,” he said. “When it comes off your tongue, there’s a little bit of joy that comes with it.”
Oxford’s Word of the Year is based on usage evidence drawn from its continually updated corpus of more than 22 billion words, gathered from news sources across the English-speaking world. The selection, according to Oxford, is meant “to reflect the ethos, mood or preoccupations” of the preceding year, while also having “potential as a term of lasting cultural significance.”
Usually, Oxford’s lexicographers assemble a shortlist of words or expressions that saw a statistically relevant surge, and then choose a winner. But in recent years, Oxford has turned the selection process into the lexicographical version of a reality show.
Last year, Oxford let the public vote on three finalists. (“Goblin mode” came out on top, because 2022.) This year, the public was invited to cut the shortlist list in half by weighing in on four head-to-head thematic pairings. (Some 30,000 people voted, Oxford said.) Oxford’s team then made the final selection.
One pairing, “Swiftie” vs. “de-influencing,” related to celebrity culture. Others reflected personal characteristics (“rizz” vs. “beige flag,” a characteristic suggesting a partner is boring), the changing world (“prompt” vs. “heat dome”) and relationships (“parasocial” vs. “situationship”).
Grathwohl guessed, correctly, that the contest would ultimately come down to “Swiftie” vs. “rizz.” Which it did, but only after “de-influencing” (the practice of discouraging people from buying particular products, or reducing their consumption more generally) made a strong run at knocking out “Swiftie.”
As for “rizz,” Grathwohl said the word has some interesting features. Usually, shortened forms are taken from the start of a word (app, rhino) or the end (hood, bot). It’s more unusual, but not unheard of, for abbreviated forms to come from the middle (flu, fridge), he said.
He noted that “rizz” also gets used as a verb (as in to “rizz it up,” or charm someone). “As a word expands from one part of speech to another, that’s an indicator it might have some staying power,” he said.
And he had a friendly comment for Holland. “I hate to be a linguistic watchdog, but Tom should know that limited rizz is still rizz,” Grathwohl said. “He’s not being very precise.”
“Swiftie,” for all its overexposure, is also notable, Grathwohl said, for the way it illustrates how “fanalects”(languages that fans develop among themselves) take hold. Many never make it out of various subreddits. But now, with so many more ways to share, they can spread more easily.
In case you’re wondering: No, Taylor Swift and the supposedly rizz-challenged Tom Holland are not known to have officially dated. (Holland is happily in a relationship with Zendaya.) But today, everyone on Earth might feel like they’re in a parasocial situationship with Swift, whether they like it or not.
Still, Grathwohl said that “Swiftie” could transcend Swift herself, and become a more general descriptor of a certain worldview and lifestyle, much like “Deadhead” has come to conjure up more than just fandom for the Grateful Dead.
Still, even the seeming Taylor-fication of everything pales before the power of artificial intelligence. The surge in words like “prompt” (an instruction given to an A.I. program), Grathwohl said, reflects the way specialist vocabulary can enter the mainstream, propelled in this case by the enormous volume of conversation about generative A.I. following the release of ChatGPT in late 2022.
So, will our machine overlords ever play a role in selecting the Word of the Year?
“It would not be an illogical step if we’re looking to validate our models,” Grathwohl said. “Large language modules have the ability to crunch data a lot more effectively than humans.”
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