Collins has selected Vibe Coding as its Word of the Year 2025, reflecting the current trend towards the use of natural language prompts for code creation.

In choosing the word of the year the Collins Dictionary team, composed of multiple experts, look for a word that serves as a  a cultural marker that captures the zeitgeist, the defining mood, concerns, or preoccupations of the year. In this case, "vibe coding" reflects the massive and rapid shift towards AI integration.

The Collins Blog explains that ‘Vibe coding’ is an emerging approach to software development that turns natural language into computer code using AI, explaining:

Basically, telling a machine what you want rather than painstakingly coding it yourself. It’s programming by vibes, not variables. While tech experts debate whether it’s revolutionary or reckless, the term has resonated far beyond Silicon Valley, speaking to a broader cultural shift towards AI-assisted everything in everyday life.

Characterising the term as a noun and as slang, the Collins English Dictionary defines it as:

the use of artificial intelligence prompted by natural language to assist with the writing of computer code

In the illustration above the developer has spoken the prompt:

Create a calming structured app that tracks patterns and helps users stay mindful

How appropriate that as the user is a cat, the app features goldfish. 

The other criteria for the Word of the Year are that it is either a completely new word or an existing word that has taken on a significantly new sense or meaning during the year and that it should have had a huge increase in usage in the previous 12 months.

The term "Vibe coding" satisfies both of them. As previously noted on I Programmer, The term "vibe coding" was coined by Open AI co-founder Andrej Kaparthy in a post on X on February 2, 2005: 

There's a new kind of coding I call "vibe coding" where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials and forget that the code even exists. 

The post went viral and according to Exploding topics searches for the term increased 6700% in a three month period to July 2025. Moreover vibe coding itself was enthusiastically embraced as evidenced by this Lightcone Podcast from April 2025, with the title Vibe Coding Is The Future. 

Reporting on the results of a survey of  the founders of current Y Combinator startups it reveals the "crazy finding" that a quarter of them claim that more than 95% of their code base was AI- generated. 

The 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey reported that 84% of all developers are currently using or planning to use AI tools in their development process, with 51% of professional developers using them daily. However, when respondents were asked:

Is "vibe coding" part of your professional development work?

over three quarters of respondents answered "No". 

The fact that the term could be used in the survey does mean it is in common parlance and deserves to be a Word of the Year. 

More Information

Collins Word of the Year 2025

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