Each year, word of the year gets darker. ‘Six-seven’ may be annoying – but it’s bucked that trend | Coco Khan

Some might regard it as ‘brain rot’, but the first word of the year just for tweens and teenagers could be the most hopeful development of 2025

What connects the word “vape”, the crying-laughing emoji and the phrase “squeezed middle”? No, it’s not just a biting crossword clue for “millennial”: they have all previously been crowned word of the year. Admittedly, there are now so many “words of the year” that, if they were physical objects, they could make a decent-sized museum collection. Which, as it happens, is exactly how I like to imagine them – artefacts of their time, telling a story of a changing society.

This year’s winners – from “parasocial” (Cambridge Dictionary’s choice) to “rage bait” (Oxford English Dictionary), “67 (six-seven)” (Dictionary.com) and “slop” (Merriam-Webster) – will join the group, though where in the “museum” remains to be seen. Will they sit in the permanent collection, along with 2005’s “podcast” and 2015’s “binge-watch”? Or the archive, where irrelevances such as 2007’s “w00t” are packed off to, to see out their days alongside David Cameron’s lesser-remembered very bad idea: not Brexit (Collins, 2016), but “big society” (Oxford, 2010).

Coco Khan is a freelance writer and co-host of the politics podcast Pod Save the UK