A strollout of milkshake ducks
Photo by Joshua Golde on Unsplash
It’s that time again! The Macquarie Dictionary has selected Australia’s Word of the Year: the word that best reflects the zeitgeist for 2025. In the spirit of the season, let’s get judgemental and rank all 19 previous winners.
Last place
The cricketing term ‘captain’s call’ (2015) perfectly described a particular prime minister’s style of decision-making, but neither the concept nor the word was new. Fittingly, the prime minister in question lasted less than 2 years (shortest term since 1972).
Next to last
Next is a whole swag of cute names for things we had names for already. ‘Shovel-ready’ (2009)? Ready to build. ‘Googleganger’ (2010)? Doppelganger in a world run by google. Despite their novelty, the terms ‘fake news’ (2016), ‘enshittification’ (2024), ‘cozzie livs’ (2023) and ‘muffin top’ (2006) do not make propaganda, deterioration, financial stress or fat-shaming any more fun.
Middling
These words, while genuinely new, describe concepts that are no longer at all remarkable. Everyone these days is an ‘infovore’ (2013): someone who craves information from tech sources. ‘Pod slurping’ (2007), downloading huge quantities of data, is now known as life. ‘Phantom vibration syndrome’ (2012), thinking you can hear or feel your phone when you don’t, is just not special enough to have its own phrase.
Pretty good
These words are particularly poignant, as they capture a time as well as their meanings. Remember ‘toxic debt’ (2008)? Remember the ‘strollout’ (2021), before we realised that government rollouts are always slow? Most importantly, let’s remember ‘me too’ (2018), a concept whose time is unfortunately not yet over. Let’s dream of the day when nobody knows what it means.
Highly commended
Here we honour words for brand new things that genuinely needed brand new names: the ‘burkini’ (2011), an entirely new garment; and ‘teal’ (2022), a political identity that’s a bit green and a bit blue. It’s now hard to imagine a world without them.
Gold standard
These words are the best of the best: new, necessary, relevant, widely used and just a little bit poetic: ‘doomscrolling’ (2020), ‘cancel culture’ (2019) and ‘mansplain’ (2014). It’s such a shame they’re all a bit negative.
And the winner is …
‘Milkshake duck’ (2017). Like shibboleth and multisyllabic, it is a rare word that is an example of its own meaning. (A milkshake duck is something that was briefly famous, like a former Word of the Year that nobody remembers.)
Wishing the best of futures for ‘AI slop’, the Macquarie Dictionary Word of the Year 2025. Will it become unremarkable, like ‘pod slurping’, or a constant thorn in our side, like ‘doomscrolling’? Or is it part of AI’s own ‘me too’: a moment of realising the harm caused by ongoing exploitation of power inequality? Time will tell.
This article was written by humans.
