Oxford’s 2023 Word of the Year is… ‘rizz’
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Rizz was first recorded in 2022, according to Oxford. But it went viral in June, after actor Tom Holland used it in an interview with BuzzFeed.
PHOTO: PEXELS
OXFORD – It is official. Oxford University Press, the world’s second-oldest academic press and publisher of the Oxford English Dictionary, has rizz.
Or at least, like the rest of us over a certain age, it is trying to get some.
Rizz – Gen Z (or is it Gen Alpha?) slang for style, charm or attractiveness, or the ability to attract a romantic or sexual partner – has been named as Oxford’s 2023 Word of the Year, beating contenders including situationship, prompt, de-influencing and, yes, Swiftie.
Rizz was first recorded in 2022, according to Oxford. But it went viral in June, after British actor Tom Holland, in an interview with BuzzFeed, said: “I have no rizz whatsoever. I have limited rizz.”
That spawned a crush of memes, as overall usage surged by a factor of about 15 over the previous year, according to Oxford’s data.
Mr Casper Grathwohl, president of Oxford Languages, the dictionary division, said 2023’s choice reflects the way social media has increased the pace of language change exponentially. Plus, he said, the word simply has… rizz.
“One of the reasons it’s moving from being a niche social media phrase into the mainstream is, it’s just fun to say,” he added.
Oxford’s Word of the Year is based on usage evidence drawn from its continually updated corpus of more than 22 billion words, gathered from news sources across the English-speaking world.
The selection, according to Oxford, is meant “to reflect the ethos, mood or preoccupations” of the preceding year.
In 2023, the public was invited to cut the shortlist list in half by weighing in on four head-to-head thematic pairings. (Some 30,000 people voted, Oxford said.) Oxford’s team then made the final selection.
One pairing, Swiftie versus de-influencing, related to celebrity culture. Others reflected personal characteristics (rizz versus beige flag, a characteristic suggesting a partner is boring), the changing world (prompt versus heat dome) and relationships (parasocial versus situationship).
Mr Grathwohl guessed, correctly, that the contest would ultimately come down to Swiftie versus rizz. Which it did, but only after de-influencing (the practice of discouraging people from buying particular products, or reducing their consumption more generally) made a strong run at knocking out Swiftie. NYTIMES
