My five favourite words of the year (not all of them are English)

Times

2 days ago

When I was younger, I didn't have much stuff — there was a three-year period where I didn't even have a coat and simply used a stout woollen dressing gown during the winter months. But humans wish to collect things, no matter their cashflow situation, so I used to collect words instead. I had a blank postcard on my wall on which I would write — in my poshest handwriting — all the words I thought most beautiful. Cathedral, shagreen, mercury, zaftig. I remember discovering 'corybantic' ('Wild, frenzied: like the first chord of a big rock song') and wearing it, conversationally, like a new hat.
Obviously, I have more stuff these days— I have three coats and a dressing gown now, so don't worry about me — but I still have a postcard on my wall where I collect the year's best new words. Halfway through 2025, here are my favourites so far.
The ancient Greek term for the house or home. It's a better word than home, though — because it's more of an ethos. The oikos is the entirety of your home life — the cutlery drawer and the daughter sitting on the table, drinking tea and telling old jokes. The pot of soup and the friends staying for the weekend. Oikos includes your wider community, your beliefs, your pets. 'House' simply sounds like bricks and windows; 'home' is too simple; and 'domestic' has an element of drudgery to it. Whereas oikos feels more representative of the kingdom a middle-aged woman usually presides over: the laws and loves; the routines and comforts. I am not a wife or a mother or the head of a household — I am the ruler of an oikos. I dig oikos.
An incredibly useful Danish word that translates as 'tooth butter'. It describes the wonderful and correct set of circumstances wherein you've buttered bread so thickly that, when you bite into it, you leave gouge marks like the White Cliffs of Dover. As someone who believes wholeheartedly in excessive butterment — I find those tiny, individually wrapped pats of butter offensive: I WANT BUTTER, NOT SOME MIMSY GHOST-SMEAR — tandsmor speaks to me on a visceral level. Unless you are leaving tooth marks in butter, you are not experiencing butter. You're just making some bread a bit greasy.
And particularly 'haptic memory'. This is the recollection of touch — how it feels to stroke the swollen belly of your just fed baby. The relief of applying a cold hose to hot feet. I have a very vivid haptic memory of what it felt like, in 1990, to finger the puncture mark on the small, cardboard bus ticket as I took the 512 up town. Similarly, I can recall the exact sensation of running down St James's Street in Brighton in Birkenstocks and smashing my little toe into a bag of pulpy rubble against the side of the kerb. Haptic.
Limerence has had quite a year, as the singer/songwriter Lucy Dacus had a track with this title that 6 Music played a lot. Limerence is when you are obsessively, addictively infatuated with someone who almost certainly does not reciprocate your feelings. That rollercoaster between ecstasy and despair, where your day can be completely derailed by the object of your love merely looking your way, or not.
Although it's usually employed to describe a lovesick crush, I've found it more useful to describe people's relationship with social media. Social media is also almost certainly not going to reciprocate your feelings. Social media also puts you on a rollercoaster of ecstasy and despair, depending on whether it looks your way or not. Social media is basically the boy who made your teenage years a misery, as you desperately hoped to get his attention by looking sexy or telling loud jokes. And yet, still, millions of people are hunched over their phones, ecstatic when they get three 'likes', despairing when they get none — in a state of technological and communicational limerence.
This is a Gen Z term, and I feel it represents that adorable, pressurised, striving generation perfectly. Mid is basically the 21st century 'meh' — 'The party was giving mid'; 'Her outfit was pretty mid' — but somehow it seems far more polite. Meh sounds emotionally dismissive — it's a tetchy snort — but mid sounds like it is based on inarguable data. As if the mid-ness of Scarlett's new fringe has simply been aggregated through reviews on Tripadvisor — no personal judgment involved. As a way of understanding how Gen Z has tried to retain the birthright of every person on earth — to be bitchy — but also attempted to be #bekind and reasonable about it, I find it quite moving. It's definitely another one for the collection.