Forget the books of the year. Now we have words of the year – a seasonal phenomenon that goes back to the early 1970s in Germany. In English the announcing of a word for our times has come to serve as a handy gambit for lexicographical publishers who feel the need to remind the reading public of their existence.
The Oxford word of the year for 2025 is really two words: rage bait. “Online content”, that is, “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 account.” Around 30,000 people voted for this term, which can be traced back to 2002, in preference to aura farming (“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”) and biohack (“To attempt to improve or optimize one’s physical or mental performance, health, longevity, or wellbeing by altering one’s diet, exercise routine, or lifestyle, or by using other means such as drugs, supplements, or technological devices”). Rage bait is the successor to brain rot, which is also not one word.
Not to be outdone, Collins has chosen as its blithe phrase of the year vibe coding – a coinage of the artificial intelligence engineer Andrej Karpathy, describing how AI can be used to build a new app without even thinking about coding in its conventional sense, let alone using it. AI was itself the Collins “word” of 2023.
And the Cambridge Dictionary word of the year? Again, we sense that it has something to do with the internet: parasocial, adjective, “involving or relating to a connection that someone feels between themselves and a famous person they do not know, a character in a book, film, TV series, etc., or an artificial intelligence”. The Cantabrigian series goes back only as far as 2015, making it the youngest of the three similar exercises mentioned here. When strung together, the ten predecessors to parasocial testify, in minimalist fashion, to some of the past decade’s more distinctive (though seldom delightful) qualities: austerity, paranoid, populism, nomophobia, upcycling, quarantine, perseverance, homer, hallucinate, manifest.
Quite a different verbal diversion is offered by Colin Sackett in done (Uniformbooks, £8). This wry booklet updates a work originally published in 2006 – a jeu de mots by which “joined- together words”, as a note here suggests, if lingered over, “become both more trite and more suggestive because they are presented in the way they are”. Presentation is key here: Mr Sackett opts for a sans-serif typeface and stacks his conjoined words in neat blocks on each page, with the spaces between words removed.
The effect of done’s concrete poetry cannot be precisely reproduced here; but we know that some readers will be tickled by the visual impact of phrases such as blackmarksmatter and brokenheartattack, noorlittleinterest and notnaminganyone, recentlysadlydead and surrealistocklists. None of these squashed-up words, we should add, is an Oxford, Collins or Cambridge word of the year.
Could it be that Babar is still the world’s most popular African elephant? The long-running series of books about his adventures was initiated by Jean de Brunhoff in 1931, and continued after his death six years later by his son, Laurent. It has sparked the odd controversy, we gather, but continues to sell remarkably well.
There is only one copy of Le Voyage de Babar (1932), however, inscribed by its author for certain friends in Switzerland – a copy not only inscribed, that is, for “monsieur et madame Gregory”, but adorned, on the front free endpaper, with a drawing, reproduced here, of Babar buying a hat for “Mr. Gregory”. “Très joli!”, the royal customer says of the item accordingly proposed by “Le vendeur”. “Vous l’enverrez aujourd’hui de ma part à Mr Gregory au chalet La Fenière”.
Presentation copies of Babar books from de Brunhoff père are “extremely rare” according to An Enduring Magic: Treasures of children’s literature, the abundantly luxurious new catalogue from Jonkers Rare Books. The Gregory item is offered here for £35,000. For £5,000 less than that, somebody may yet lay claim to A Christmas Carol in a “very well preserved copy” of the first edition, first issue of 1843, or A Happy Pair, Beatrix Potter’s first book, first published in 1890.
Our eye was also caught by six watercolours by the Scottish artist Jessie M. King, one of the “Glasgow Girls”, produced as illustrations for an adventure story by Isobel Steele called The Enchanted Capital of Scotland (1945). Offered for various prices, these busy scenes employ a palette “much more muted than the reproductions in the book”; they are both “more reflective of the actual colours seen in and around Edinburgh, and less garish than the printed version”. And amid many fine copies of perennial favourites are several significant manuscripts by A. A. Milne – who happened to write the introduction for the first edition of Babar in English.
Correspondence. We had reason to mention that Charlie Watts of the Rolling Stones was a collector of books when he wasn’t behind the drumkit (October 31). Now we have an eyewitness to these pursuits: Nick Rawlinson writes from Barcelona, recalling that, “back in the early 1980s I worked in a bookshop in Gloucester”. One day behind the till Mr Rawlinson looked up to see Watts standing in front of him, “with a pile of books in his hands, among them several volumes of Proust”. The Reading Stone “spent well over £100 and, despite my pleadings, the shop manager turned down my request to have the cheque framed”.
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