Vibe of the Year

As a new year approaches, we’re all thinking about how to navigate the stage—or simultaneous stages—that we’re currently inhabiting. Or planning the next way we’ll reinvent ourselves.

The new prominence of the word eras is a reminder that we can define our own eras however we want. What era are you in?

We chose a “Vibe of the Year.” It’s eras—for more than one reason.

A Renaissance era for women in the spotlight

In 2023, a few pop megastars seemingly ran the world.

In this age of endless choice and algorithmic niche, Taylor Swift and Beyoncé’s album releases, world tours, and concert films have become true monoculture moments. Their Eras and Renaissance tours have brought wild success wherever they’ve gone, even boosting the economies of entire cities.

The year also marked a new era for other iconic women. Barbie made her big screen debut, earning the year’s highest box office haul ($1.44 billion), making director Greta Gerwig the highest-grossing solo woman director in history, and becoming one half of the year’s most prominent meme (Barbenheimer).

This was the year Michelle Yeoh became the first Asian woman to win the Oscar for Best Actress and Viola Davis became the third Black woman to earn EGOT status.

It was also a year in which women’s sports reached new heights, including new attendance and viewership records for women’s basketball in both the WNBA and NCAA, with young stars like Aliyah Boston, Caitlin Clark, and Angel Reese bringing the sport into a new era.  

New attendance and viewership highs were also recorded throughout the 2023 Women’s World Cup, culminating in the Spanish team winning its first World Cup and then championing the movement against abuse and harassment of women that became known as #SeAcabó (translated as “It’s over” or “That’s enough”).

Elsewhere on the world stage, the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Iranian activist Narges Mohammadi, “for her fight against the oppression of women in Iran and her fight to promote human rights and freedom for all.”

Along with debates about who’s got rizz and who’s a nepo baby (or nepo friend), one of 2023’s most prominent slang discussions was about girl dinner. The concept and the term for it were coined on TikTok by Olivia Maher, whose viral video inspired the online masses to share (and joke about) their own versions of mealtime adulting.

An era of girl-powered words

Girl dinner was just one of several “girl” words (including girl math, lucky girl syndrome, and others) that trended in 2023, with the word girl, in many cases, serving as an intentional indication of familiarity and camaraderie among women.

Fittingly, another woman-coined word featured in recent headlines this year is vibecession, a combination of vibe and recession introduced by content creator Kyla Scanlon to refer to widespread pessimism about the economy regardless of the actual economic situation.

In 2023, the word eras forever took on a new connotation. The name of Taylor Swift’s generation-defining Eras concert tour is most directly a reference to its celebration of the many distinct eras of her career, simultaneously retrospective and forward-looking.  

But the tour’s name also nods to a more personal sense of the word era recently popularized as a way that people empower themselves to define—and redefine—their own personal eras, including ending old ones, starting new ones, and vibing with whatever era they’re in right now.

This year, one of the top lookups at Dictionary.com was the word vibe, the current go-to term—along with the plural vibes—for talking about the overall feel of a situation or person.

Which got us thinking: Is there a word that best represents the culture vibe we collectively experienced in 2023?

And so, for the first time, we’ve chosen a Vibe of the Year. (In addition to our 2023 Word of the Year.)

December 18, 2023

In my single era and loving it

Nigel Sussman. 2023.

The word we selected for Vibe of the Year is based on the shared sense that we’re all looking for ways to define the perpetually shifting stages of our cultural and personal histories.

Our choice is also, of course, inspired by the year’s most high-profile, record-setting, impossible-to-ignore cultural phenomenon. 🫶

The Dictionary.com Vibe of the Year is eras.

It’s about more than just Taylor. (But yes, also Taylor.)

Officially ending my wait-and-see era and entering my make-it-happen era  

I’m now fully in my adult coloring book era

Swift’s use of the word on the grandest of stages has helped to solidify it as a way of taking control of one’s own story.  

In 2023, we witnessed powerful new stories and new eras for women in pop culture and beyond, continuing the momentum we highlighted last year in our announcement of woman as the 2022 Word of the Year.

New eras ahead