Mystery Review Crew’s Word of the Year (2025 WOTY)
Each year, the hunt is on for the one word that reflects the vibe of the last twelve months—a summary, a snapshot of what shaped human behavior. The single term that captures what people were talking about, worrying about, or trying to understand. The Word of the Year—The WOTY.
The 2025 WOTY isn’t just a crown for a trendy word, and it doesn’t predict the future. Instead, it helps us make sense of the year we just lived through, illuminating the forces that shaped it.
By choosing a single word, dictionary publishers give us a way to understand the underlying story behind the headlines and hashtags. It’s less about the word itself and more about what it says about us. It’s why selecting just the right word isn’t an easy task. Oxford University Press reported over 30,000 votes during their search.
As logophiles, true lovers of words, the Crew has always taken an active interest in WOTYs, even choosing our own each year to highlight the shifts that influenced reading, writing, and storytelling. And this year, a pattern emerged. A shared theme rose to the surface, dominating the 2025 WOTY selections across the major dictionaries … and echoing in ours as well.
AI, Artificial Intelligence, set the tone for 2025 in ways impossible to ignore. It accelerated the spread of information and blurred the line between human and artificial content. The digital market was flooded with AI-driven posts, emails, images, and videos. Algorithms affected what people saw, reacted to, and believed. Conversations and news articles erupted about trust, truth, originality, and loss of human potential. Whether people embraced AI, pushed back against it, or simply tried to keep up, its presence reshaped the environment around us more than any other force.
2025 WOTY Round up
This one caught the Crew’s attention, and honestly, it’s one we’ve felt.
The earliest meaning of SLOP was mud. Then it transitioned to food waste, chiefly for pigs, before becoming more general as rubbish. With AI, the word took on new heights. It’s now defined as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.”
And, according to Merriam-Webster, the definition includes, “absurd videos, off-kilter advertising images, cheesy propaganda, fake news that looks pretty real, junky AI-written books, “workslop” reports that waste coworkers’ time… and lots of talking cats.” I’d bet that last one grabbed a few of you.
Having published two articles, Autopsy of a Scam: Dissecting the AI Pitch That Hooks Authors and How To Spot A Scam Email: Red Flags Every Author Should Know, we’d certainly be inclined to add fake book promotional schemes to the list of SLOP.
Oxford University Press: RAGE BAIT
Oxford went with rage bait. “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 account.” Basically, all that online stuff is designed to tick you off just enough to make you click, comment, or doom-scroll. It’s the perfect snapshot of a year when the internet felt like it was constantly poking the bear or teasing a rattlesnake.
Cambridge picked parasocial, which was defined as “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, or an artificial intelligence.” AI even got into the act on this one.
Vibe Coding: “an emerging software development that turns natural language into computer code.” In other words, describe what you want in plain language, and AI generates the code.
Mystery Review Crew 2025 WOTY
Every year, the Mystery Review Crew chooses a single word to capture how the book world has shifted—how readers read, how stories resonate, and how our community grows. Our 2025 WOTY reflects the journey we’ve already taken.
For as long as stories have been told, an author’s voice has been the thread that sets one storyteller apart from another. It’s evolved through eras and genres, shaped by shifting tastes, new technologies, and the changing ways readers connect with books. Yet even as formats transformed—from handwritten manuscripts to mass-market paperbacks to digital everything—the one constant has been the unmistakable imprint of the writer behind the words. That lived-in quality, that sense of a mind at work on the page, is what readers return to again and again.
An author’s voice is the one thing AI can’t fake. It’s the fingerprint in the prose—the rhythm, the instincts, the emotional undercurrent that makes a story come alive, rather than feel assembled.
An author’s voice isn’t just a choice of POV, tense, or words. It’s the sum of an author’s experiences, biases, humor, hopes and dreams, scars, and opinions. It’s the reason two writers can describe the same scene and produce something entirely different. In a year when artificially generated content blurred the lines of originality, an authentic authorial voice did what nothing synthetic could. It was a resounding reminder that behind every story is a unique individual, an irreplaceable human imprint that can’t be duplicated.
The Mystery Review Crew’s 2025 Word of the Year is: AUTHENTICITY
In a year when 6,000 to 11,000 (depending on which figures are used) new books hit the market every single day, burying readers in volume rather than value, authenticity wasn’t just a signal. It was a red flag alert that something essential was at risk. The human presence behind the storytelling. Stories endure because of the people who write them and the voices that give them life.
As we step into 2026, that truth feels more crucial than ever. For the Crew, authenticity is more than a literary ideal. It’s the foundation of our community. It’s the trust between authors and readers, the honesty in reviews, and the shared belief that real stories still matter. That’s the compass guiding us into the year ahead.
See past Mystery Review Crew WOTY’s:
