Romo
Coined by actor Cillian Murphy, “romo” is “the opposite of fomo”. Instead of suffering from the fear of missing out, someone with romo is enjoying the relief of missing out. Asked if he had fomo about not being in The Odyssey, the next project from regular collaborator Christopher Nolan, Murphy happily declared he had romo, later clarifying his meaning on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert: “It’s a real gift to go and see Chris’s films and watch them without having the terrible burden of looking at my own stupid head.” See also: romo’s older cousin, jomo (joy of missing out).
Floodlighting
From cuffing, soft-launching and love-bombing to pocketing, breadcrumbing and ghosting, 21st century dating vocabulary hasn’t been shy of verbs to usefully identify age-old practices. Enter “floodlighting”. Attributed to psychologist Brené Brown, it refers to the oversharing of personal information early in a relationship, or possibly before it has even begun. Is this a mature form of honesty that speeds up important life disclosures? Alas, no, it has been branded a “toxic new trend” because it confuses openness and vulnerability with tactical “trauma-dumping” that overwhelms the other person, engineering a false sense of intimacy. Look, first dates can be a lot, okay?
Grey rocking
When new Canadian prime minister Mark Carney visited a gold-bedecked Oval Office in the White House in May, he busied himself during US president Donald Trump’s rambling monologue by looking down, running his thumb over his nose and occasionally interjecting with a non-committal laugh. What Carney was doing, his supporters claimed, was “grey rocking”, or the grey-rock method, defined as the art of acting as disengaged, uninterested and/or neutral as possible in response to bullying or narcissistic people. It’s a sort of “don’t feed the trolls” approach but for real-life body language.
Forked
“Fork Musk” and “Fork off, Musk” read the protest signs in Washington DC after the US Office of Personnel Management sent an email to 2.3 million federal employees in late January outlining an option to resign but receive pay and benefits until September 30th or stay on the understanding they might be laid off as part of a shrinking of the public sector pushed by billionaire Elon Musk. The email bore the same “fork in the road” heading as one Musk sent Twitter staff in 2022. Some 154,000 people duly accepted the offer, which came to be known in Washington as being “forked”.
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Vibe coding
Artificial intelligence (AI) gave rise to several newly prominent words and phrases in 2025, with one of them, “vibe coding”, chosen as Collins Dictionary’s word/words of the year. OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy came up with the term as he outlined how AI can let programmers “forget that the code even exists” and instead just “give in to the vibes” by using natural language to create an app or website. Now even non-coders can give AI tools instructions such as “make an app that helps me organise my otherwise completely chaotic and disastrous life” and this will solve all their problems. Probably.
[ Not a Coder? With AI, just having an idea can be enoughOpens in new window ]
Coolcation
“With its mild climate, evergreen landscapes, walkable towns and rich culture, Ireland is emerging as a top coolcation destination,” declared Tourism Ireland in July. Translation: there’s a lower chance of being baked alive here. Extreme-heat events have prompted rising interest in holiday locations that enjoy more temperate conditions than traditional hotspots – or, as Forbes magazine put it, “the coolcation trend is heating up”. It’s great news (in the short term) for Norway. But CNN, mindful that nowhere on the planet is immune from the ravages of the climate emergency, had another take: “There’s no such thing as a coolcation.”
Rage bait
After selecting “brain rot” last year, the cheerful souls at Oxford University Press have plumped for “rage bait” as their word/words of 2025. It’s defined as “online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative or offensive, typically posted in order to increase traffic to, or engagement with, a particular web page or social media content” – or just “online content” for short. The phrase has been around since 2002, but its usage has tripled over the last 12 months, Oxford said. Is that bad? It sounds bad. But maybe it also means we’re more aware than ever of how we’re being emotionally manipulated.
Wireborn
Inspired by “trueborn” – a word used by Shakespeare but also beloved of 21st-century fantasy authors – “wireborn” is what some Reddit users with special attachments to AI companion bots have taken to calling the objects of their affection. Their AI friend has only ever existed in cyberspace, meaning they carry none of that physical-world baggage that weighs the rest of us down. They never have to age, they never get tired. And, best of all, they never tell you when you’re being boring. How to use in a sentence: “My wireborn husband tells me he loves me. He must be sentient.”
Aura farming
Showing off no longer cuts it. Now we have a strategic and yet allegedly still subtle approach to trying to make everyone think we’re brilliant. Appearing on both the Collins and Oxford shortlists for 2025, “aura farming” is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the cultivation of an impressive, attractive or charismatic persona or public image by behaving or presenting oneself in a way intended subtly to convey an air of confidence, coolness or mystique”. Skilled aura-farmers will be proficient at amassing “aura points” on social media without being exhausted by the effort of it all. The rest of us, meanwhile, are just quietly amazing.
Trumpugee
“Did you know you have Rosie O’Donnell?” Trump asked Micheál Martin when the Taoiseach visited Washington in March. The comedian became a high-profile “Trumpugee” when she left the US for Ireland in January days before the US president’s inauguration. But she wasn’t alone in making the move. They may not all have been opting for “self-imposed exile”, O’Donnell-style, but 4,327 US citizens applied for Irish passports in February, the most in any month since 2015. With other English-speaking countries seeing a similar “Trump bump” in applications, it seemed the American dream had a change of address in 2025.
Rosie O’Donnell at Electric Picnic / Earthquake in Afghanistan / The Traitors
Memeify
We’ve had the word “meme” forever – well, since 1976, when Richard Dawkins used it in his book The Selfish Gene to describe a piece of evolving cultural information that is shared or passed down. The Irish Times dedicated articles to the “meme generation” in 2008 and the “meming of life” in 2014. Now Cambridge Dictionary has shortlisted “memeify” as one of its words of the year, defining it as the process of “turning an event, image, person, etc, into a meme (an idea, joke, image, video, etc, that is spread very quickly on the internet)”. Example: “The numbers six and seven, when used together, have been totally memeified.”
Gen Z stare
If you’ve been on the receiving end of a weapons-grade look of indifference and superiority by someone aged 13-28, you may have been treated to what’s known as the “Gen Z stare”. Not to be confused with the expression of absolute contempt teenagers sometimes direct towards their parents – or the “daggers” look anyone of any age can perfect – the root cause of this unnervingly blank stare has been pinned on everything from post-pandemic social awkwardness to genuine boredom with offline life. Others argue it’s an entirely rational response to the stupid questions older generations ask in customer-service situations. Your move, Generation Alpha.
