Gazià, neurodivergent, intermittent fasting: what are the 10 neologisms of the year?

• What word has defined 2025? The twelfth annual campaign to vote for the neologism that has shaped our lives this year is now open. Public voting is open until December 16th at this linkThe candidates for word of the year are: Climate crisis
• Intermittent fasting
• Gazià/gaziana
• AI
• Influencer
• Macha
• Neurodivergent
• Queer
• Mental health
• Late

The campaign is promoted by the Neology Observatory of Pompeu Fabra University with the Philological Section of the Institute for Catalan Studies, Termcat, and 3Cat, through the linguistic portal esAdir. Of the 10 shortlisted words, the one that receives the most votes will be declared the winner, and the IEC will evaluate and study it carefully with a view to incorporating it into the standard dictionary. Last year's word, danaIt has already been included in the DIEC.

The campaign aims to raise awareness among speakers about language and its evolution. Although there may sometimes be reluctance to introduce new words into the language (because there is an avalanche of Spanish and Anglicisms), it is actually a natural and positive phenomenon. A neologism is a new lexical unit, formally or semantically, created in a language from the rules of word formation or borrowed from another language. These are words that serve to define new social realities, as can be seen from the list of neologisms that have gained traction in recent years:

• estelada (2014)
• drone (2015)
• vegan (2016)
• cacerolazo (2017)
• sorority (2018)
• climate and animal rights emergency (2019)
• coronavirus (2020)
• denialism (2021)
• beer (2022)
• uncle/go viralize (2023)
• dana (2024)