Collins Dictionary’s 2025 Word of the Year list is a study in contrasts, perfectly capturing society’s schizophrenic relationship with artificial intelligence. The winner, “vibe coding,” represents our highest hopes for AI, while its key rival, “clanker,” embodies our deepest fears.
“Vibe coding” is the optimistic victor. It describes the revolutionary use of AI to translate human language and intent directly into functional software. It’s a term of access and creativity, coined by Andrej Karpathy to suggest a future where technical barriers dissolve, and anyone can build an app based on a “vibe.”
Its shadow self is “clanker.” This Star Wars-derived insult for robots and AI went viral on social media as a catch-all term for the public’s frustrations with AI. It’s the word you mutter when a chatbot fails, or you read a headline about AI threats, capturing a potent wave of distrust and annoyance.
The 24-billion-word Collins Corpus, which tracks language use, saw both terms explode this year. Their parallel rise shows that as a society, we haven’t made up our minds about AI. We are simultaneously embracing it as a creative partner and rejecting it as a derogatory “clanker.”
This tension is the defining linguistic story of 2025. As Collins’ managing director Alex Beecroft put it, these words show how our language is evolving to capture the “seamless integration” and the profound friction of “human creativity and machine intelligence.”
