Barbie gains rizz and AI sparks hallucinations in Guardian's words of 2023
The Guardian|December 30, 2023
Hallucination, Barbenheimer and acabó were among the new and breakthrough words of 2023, according to an analysis of the Guardian archive. And do you have “rizz”?
Pamela Duncan, Carmen Aguilar García, Philip McMahon
Barbie gains rizz and AI sparks hallucinations in Guardian's words of 2023

Dozens of new words appeared on the newspaper’s pages this year. And while the majority of these relate to people and placenames previously unrecorded on the news pages, some words were truly newly minted.

Foremost in this list was the unlikely phenomenon that was Barbenheimer, a portmanteau of two films released on the same day but light years apart in terms of content (the fi lms were Barbie and Oppenheimer, in case you spent July under a particularly large rock). Barbieland – although not a new entry – also surged in 2023.

“Rizz” – in the sense of charisma (the word is derived from the middle consonant ) – appeared on the Guardian’s pages for the first time this year, but went stellar when Tom Holland insisted he had none. “I have no frizz whatsoever. I have limited frizz,” the Spider-Man actor declared , spawning seemingly endless memes .

Other words new to the Guardian’s UK pages included “acabó”, which formed part of the hashtag # SeAcabó (in Spanish: “it’s over”).

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