Andrej Karpathy’s ‘Vibe Coding’ Takes Top Spot as 2025’s Word of the Year

A term coined by AI visionary Andrej Karpathy has been named Collins Dictionary’s Word of the Year for 2025. “Vibe coding,” which describes a new frontier of AI-powered software development, has captured the linguistic imagination, reflecting a major technological shift.
Karpathy, a founding engineer at OpenAI and the former director of AI at Tesla, first used the term to describe a process where a person can create an app using natural language. His vision was for a developer to be able to “forget that the code even exists,” focusing only on the creative “vibe” of the final product.
This concept has clearly resonated. Collins lexicographers, monitoring a 24-billion-word corpus, saw a “huge increase” in the term’s usage since its first appearance in February. Its selection as Word of the Year solidifies its place as the defining term for this new era of human-computer collaboration.
The word beat out other strong contenders that also reflect our complex times. Among them was “clanker,” a derogatory term for AI, and “broligarchy,” a nickname for the tech elites. The win for “vibe coding” over these more skeptical terms suggests a prevailing optimism about AI’s potential.
Alex Beecroft, Collins’ managing director, commented that the choice “perfectly captures how language is evolving alongside technology.” The term signifies AI’s role in making complex fields like coding more accessible, driven by human creativity rather than rigid syntax.