Rizz is the Oxford Word of the Year 2023 (WOTY)

From Oxford University Press:

After over 30,000 language lovers around the world got involved to help refine our shortlist of eight words, we are pleased to announce that the Oxford Word of the Year 2023 is rizz.

This year, we created a shortlist of eight words, all chosen to reflect the mood, ethos, or preoccupations of the past year, and put them to the public to vote for their favourites. Through head-to-head competitions over a four-day voting period, the public narrowed down our shortlist of worthy contenders to four finalists: rizz, Swiftie, prompt, and situationship. These words were then put to our language experts, who considered our corpus data, the vote counts, and the public commentary around the words to choose the definitive word of the year for 2023.

Why ‘rizz’?

‘rizz’ is a colloquial noun, defined as ‘style, charm, or attractiveness; the ability to attract a romantic or sexual partner’.

Etymologically, the term is believed to be a shortened form of the word ‘charisma’, taken from the middle part of the word, which is an unusual word formation pattern. Other examples of this word formation pattern include ‘fridge’ (from ‘refrigerator’) and ‘flu’ (from ‘influenza’). ‘rizz’ can also be used as a verb, in phrases such as ‘to rizz up’, which means ‘to attract, seduce, or chat up (a person)’. Expansions into other parts of speech like this can indicate that a word is becoming more prominent in the language.

Our language experts chose rizz as an interesting example of how language can be formed, shaped, and shared within communities, before being picked up more widely in society. It speaks to how younger generations now have spaces, online or otherwise, to own and define the language they use. From activism to dating and wider culture, as Gen Z comes to have more impact on society, differences in perspectives and lifestyle play out in language, too.

Learn More, Read the Complete Post

See Also: What does Oxford Word of the Year mean to us?

See Also: Eight words go head-to-head for Oxford Word of the Year 2023

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