The year’s best stories

The Cambridge Dictionary’s word of the year is parasocial, which means “involving or relating to a connection that someone feels between themselves and a famous person they do not know, a character in a book, film, TV series, etc., or an artificial intelligence.” Over at the Collins Dictionary, which monitors suddenly popular words, among this year’s winners is clanker. For anyone unfamiliar with the term, it’s used to express “people’s frustrations with, and distrust of, AI chatbots and platforms.” Germany’s renowned Langenscheidt dictionary has selected das crazy as its youth word of the year, which is not a noun but a phrase whose meaning I will let you discern on your own. And I won’t even dignify Dictionary.com’s word of the year—67—with a comment. The least we can expect from the dictionary business is the ability to distinguish between letters and numbers, even when a particular number is insanely trendy among children.

Fortunately, in the world of geopolitics we don’t have to ponder relationships with chatbots and similarly thorny issues. Instead, I have the privilege to present the new (or newly popular) geopolitical words that defined 2025.

The Cambridge Dictionary’s word of the year is parasocial, which means “involving or relating to a connection that someone feels between themselves and a famous person they do not know, a character in a book, film, TV series, etc., or an artificial intelligence.” Over at the Collins Dictionary, which monitors suddenly popular words, among this year’s winners is clanker. For anyone unfamiliar with the term, it’s used to express “people’s frustrations with, and distrust of, AI chatbots and platforms.” Germany’s renowned Langenscheidt dictionary has selected das crazy as its youth word of the year, which is not a noun but a phrase whose meaning I will let you discern on your own. And I won’t even dignify Dictionary.com’s word of the year—67—with a comment. The least we can expect from the dictionary business is the........

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