Collins Dictionary crowns AI as word of the year

Two years ago everyone was pretending to understand NFTs, and last year we were all drowning in permacrisis. In 2023, the cultural spotlight belonged entirely to two letters.

Collins Dictionary has officially crowned "AI" as its word of the year. According to the dictionary publisher, usage of the term quadrupled over the past twelve months.

Ubiquitous overnight

Technically an initialism rather than a single word, Collins defines AI as the modelling of human mental functions by computer programs. Lexicographers monitored social media and public discourse to track its rise.

Collins managing director Alex Beecroft noted that AI was undeniably the talking point of 2023. He pointed out that it transitioned at breakneck speed from futuristic fantasy into something as mundane and embedded as email or streaming services.

BBC News even asked ChatGPT for a comment on its own victory. The bot responded with characteristic corporate polish, noting that the selection reflects the profound impact of algorithms and data on an evolving world.

The timing is hard to ignore. The announcement lands just as UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak gathers around 100 world leaders, tech bosses, and researchers for a high-stakes AI safety summit.

Pop culture is already tangled up in it. The Beatles used AI audio separation to pull John Lennon’s raw vocals off an old cassette tape for their final single. Meanwhile, legendary singer Cliff Richard told the BBC he wanted nothing to do with it, hilariously confusing AI with artificial insemination.

Ozempic, greedflation, and spider-man

The annual shortlist always serves as a time capsule of global anxieties, and 2023 was no exception.

Semaglutide, the appetite-suppressing drug family behind Ozempic, saw its mentions triple, competing alongside ultraprocessed foods. Economic headaches gave us greedflation, meaning corporations using overall inflation as cover to jack up profit margins, and debanking, the act of shutting down customer accounts without warning.

Social platforms spawned their own lexicon: deinfluencing (telling followers what not to buy), nepo baby (celebrity offspring skating by on famous names), and canon event (a character-defining trauma popularized by Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse).

Why it matters

Collins giving AI top billing is completely obvious, but also completely right.

Compare this to 2021 when NFT took the crown. That was a speculative bubble that mostly evaporated once the hype dried up. AI feels fundamentally different because it immediately collapsed the distance between frontier tech and daily utility. Millions of people who do not care about neural weights are already using it every afternoon to draft memos, debug code, or touch up family photos.

At the same time, the label has become a victim of its own success. In our view, slapping AI onto every mundane piece of software has turned the acronym into marketing noise. Executives are using it to inflate stock valuations, while policymakers are oscillating between panic over existential threats and scrambling to figure out copyright law.

Making AI the word of the year signals that the curiosity phase is officially over. The technology is no longer a sci-fi demo; it is now baseline infrastructure, complete with all the messy legal, economic, and cultural friction that comes with it.