How ‘skibidi’ and ‘tradwife’ were added to the Cambridge dictionary

LONDON – A gibberish word, a gender-regressive label and the shorthand for delusional thinking have all been added to the Cambridge English Dictionary in 2025, speaking volumes about the current social media-driven culture.

Among the more than 6,000 words added to the dictionary over the past year were “skibidi”, “tradwife” and “delulu”.

Those three terms started as online slang before creeping into mainstream use offline with such force that they have been deemed by linguists to have “staying power”, according to a statement from Cambridge University Press, which publishes the dictionary.

The additions fit within a growing tendency for dictionaries and the academic world of lexicology to embrace the way that the internet shapes – and is shaped by – broader culture and language.

In 2024, Cambridge Dictionary’s

word of the year

was a modern interpretation of the term “manifest”, while Oxford Dictionary chose “brain rot”.

That these words have jumped from social media to daily conversation and that their definitions are often implicitly understood even before they have been added to the dictionary is an indication that language is “a proxy for broader cultural changes”, said Mr Adam Aleksic, a linguist who posts as “Eytmology Nerd” on social media and the author of Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming The Future Of Language.

“At the core of skibidi, tradwife and delulu, I see natural human tendencies to be funny, conservative or delusional,” he added, “all a reflection of our own humanity.”

Tradwife, which the dictionary’s editors started tracking on YouTube and Instagram in 2018 as two separate words and which began to be used more widely in 2020 as a single word, is short for traditional wife, someone who “stays at home doing cooking, cleaning, etc. and has children that she takes care of” and who posts on social media about that lifestyle, according to the dictionary.

‘Culture wars’

The term “gained momentum over the first half of this decade”, Ms Wendalyn Nichols, a publishing manager for Cambridge Dictionary who oversees the lexicography team, said in an interview, and it “now features in the culture wars”, often used as a label for more conservative women who embrace traditional gender roles.

“As lexicographers, our job is to observe and record, and it is not to pass judgment on the terms,” Ms Nichols said. “We have horrible slurs in the dictionary that are appropriately labelled and cautioned about. But they are there because, for learners, if they don’t find these words, they won’t know to be careful.”

Skibidi is a term borrowed from the YouTube animated series “Skibidi Toilet”. It has chameleonic powers in that it “has different meanings such as cool or bad, or can be used with no real meaning as a joke” depending on the context, according to the dictionary.

“It has entered the language as an intensifier,” Ms Nichols said. “It’s linguistically interesting.”

For example, when used in combination with the slang term “rizz”, which is short for charisma, it can mean that someone is “really good at flirting”, Ms Nichols said. But when combined with other terms or when used on its own, its meaning changes.

And delulu – a slang term that has been around online for about 10 years and was first used among fans of K-pop stars – is short for delusional, but its meaning has expanded to add an element of intentionality.

It means “believing things that are not real or true, usually because you choose to”. Like, for example, remaining optimistic in the face of immense challenges.

Picking words to add to the dictionary is something of a “craft”, Ms Nichols said. It requires tracking what people are looking up online, monitoring both mainstream and social media, soliciting feedback from users and watching for cultural tipping points.

“When a word moves out of quotation marks, that’s another sign that enough people know what this is,” she said. “It has a definition that people recognise, and we want to capture it.”

Covid-19, for example, entered the dictionary 37 days after it was first identified, she said. In March, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese accused members of the Parliament, in a speech, of being “delulu with no solulu”.

“When the prime minister of Australia says that,” Ms Nichols said, “we think, ‘Okay, tipping point’.” NYTIMES