Got rizz? Oxford University Press's word of the year may be next in line for refudiation

The first use of 'rizz' to mean 'charisma' is credited to Kai Cenat, seen accepting the YouTube Streamer of the Year award (Picture: Emma McIntyre/Getty Images for Dick Clark Productions)

The OUP’s word of the year, ‘rizz’, is a contraction of charisma that may not catch on

Do you have rizz? No, we didn’t think so. But that’s not to say we think you lack ‘charisma’. Just that you’d probably not put it quite like American YouTuber Kai Cenat apparently first did in 2021: “[cha] rizz [ma]”. However, enough people are saying it that the Oxford University Press has decided to make rizz its word of the year.

So, we suppose it’s possible that we’ll all be saying it without much thought sometime soon. For while English teachers, once upon a time, drilled school children in the allegedly ‘correct’ way to speak and write the language, now there is a widespread acceptance that it is, and always has been, constantly evolving.

However, it is possible, we humbly suggest, that all this could get out of hand. The gradual, incremental process of development has been supercharged by social media to the extent that English could ‘literally’ become a foreign language by Tuesday next week. That said, previous words of the year offer some comfort to traditionalists, given that suggestions of a goblin-mode youthquake have been fairly comprehensively refudiated. Whatever that means.

Got rizz? Oxford University Press's word of the year may be next in line for refudiation – Scotsman comment

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