Collins Dictionary has crowned “vibe coding” as its 2025 Word of the Year, reflecting the growing influence of artificial intelligence (AI) on everyday creativity and communication.

The phrase, coined in February by OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy, describes the process of creating software by simply describing what you want to an AI tool instead of writing traditional programming code. Users might prompt a chatbot with instructions like “make me an app that plans my weekly meals,” allowing non-coders to build basic programs through natural language.

Alex Beecroft, Managing Director of Collins, said the term: “perfectly captures how language is evolving alongside technology.” The dictionary’s editors noted that while vibe coding allows people to: “forget that the code even exists,” the process remains imperfect, with many AI-generated apps containing bugs or incomplete logic.

“Vibe coding” topped a shortlist of ten words that captured the cultural tone of 2025, including “clanker,” revived from Star Wars to describe frustrating AI-powered machines, and “aura farming,” used for people performing cool acts for social media attention. Also featured was “broligarchy,” a mash-up describing the tech elite said to wield major political influence.

Other shortlisted terms included biohacking, coolcation, glaze, HENRY (high earner, not rich yet), micro-retirement, and taskmasking – collectively painting a portrait of a year shaped by technology, self-optimisation, and digital reinvention.