The Collins Dictionary has chosen “vibe coding” as the word of the year 2025, a recognition that perfectly captures the way in which artificial intelligence is transforming the way we create. But what does it really mean? The term, coined by Andrej Karpathy, former director of Tesla, describes a new approach to programming: just write an instruction in natural language, and AI automatically generates the code needed to build a site, app or software.
In other words, you no longer need to be an expert programmer to create something technologically complex. Vibe coding opens the door to a democratization of digital, where even those who have never written a line of code can experiment with technological creativity.
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From keyboard to prompt: the linguistic revolution of 2025
To choose the winner, Collins Dictionary analyzed the Collins Corpus, an archive of over 24 billion words from media, social media and publications. The trend is clear: the conversation around AI is now dominant, and the language is evolving accordingly. According to CEO Alex Beecroft, “vibe coding” represents “the meeting between human authenticity and intelligent automation”, a sign of how the boundary between creativity and technology is becoming increasingly thin.
The concept goes beyond programming: vibe coding becomes a cultural metaphor for how we are adapting to a reality in which machines understand the nuances of human language. Once upon a time highly specialized skills were needed, today it is enough to “explain well” to the AI what we want to achieve.
The other words in the competition: biohacking, clanker and coolcation
In the ranking of the most influential words of 2025, alongside vibe coding, curious terms also stand out such as biohacking, the art of modifying one’s body to improve health and longevity, and clanker, used to describe the robots in films and video games by Star Wars. Then there is glaze, which indicates the act of excessively flattering someone, and taskmasking, or pretending to be productive at work while in reality you are doing something completely different. Finally, the trend of coolcation, holidays in places with a cool climate, the perfect antithesis of hot summers.
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