“Vibe Coding” Hailed as “Seamless” Human-AI Blend, Wins Collins Word of the Year

Collins Dictionary has selected “vibe coding” as its 2025 Word of the Year, celebrating the term as a symbol of a new, positive relationship between humans and machines. The word, which means to use natural language to have an AI generate code, highlights a “seamless integration of human creativity and machine intelligence,” according to the dictionary’s managing director.
This choice, made by lexicographers monitoring a 24-billion-word corpus, reflects a “major shift in software development,” said Alex Beecroft of Collins. He emphasized that “vibe coding” is “making coding more accessible” and “fundamentally changing our interaction with computers.”
The term was coined in February by Andrej Karpathy, a prominent engineer at OpenAI. His vision of a developer focusing on the “vibe” while the AI handles the “code” has clearly become a reality, as the word’s usage skyrocketed in just a few months.
The win for “vibe coding” is significant as it beat “clanker,” a derogatory term for AI that also made the list. This suggests that the language of AI as a creative partner is, for now, more linguistically significant than the language of AI as a frustrating obstacle.
The 2025 list was “tech-heavy,” also featuring “broligarchy” (the tech elite) and “biohacking” (health optimization). It was rounded out by terms reflecting modern work (“taskmasking,” “micro-retirement”) and wealth (“Henry”).