“Skibidi” doesn’t belong in the dictionary

When Cambridge Dictionary announced last week that “skibidi” was among the 6,000 words added to its pages, I was determined to ignore it. Along with “delulu,” “tradwife,” “inspo” and “broligarchy,” it was meant to grab headlines, even if it seemed fully at odds with the Cambridge lexicographer who classified the new entrants as words that had “staying power.” I wanted to continue to think of “skibidi” as noise, or ideally not think of it at all; it’s not even the corniest word added in 2025, or the most desperate to be validated. (My vote for both is “snoafer,” allegedly a shoe that is part sneaker and part loafer.) But I’ve come to an unsettling conclusion: “Skibidi” actually matters. “Skibidi” is a warning signal in the guise of a stupid online meme. And, not to be dramatic, but we should take it seriously.

“Skibidi” entered our consciousness in 2024 as a joke, a goof, evidence of Gen-Z brain rot. Per Cambridge Dictionary, “‘skibidi’ can have different meanings such as ‘cool’ or ‘bad,’ or can be used with no real meaning as a joke.” Adding it to the dictionary, a book of words, conflicts with Cambridge’s definition of a word as “a single unit of language that has meaning.” In sample sentences,”skibidi” is used as an adjective (“what was the most skibidi part?”), an attributive noun (“that wasn’t very skibidi rizz of you”) and a grammatical expletive (“What the skibidi are you doing?”).

But “skibidi” is also used to reference the contention that “skibidi” is a real word that people are using in earnest. And in doing so, “skibidi” insists upon itself. It has meaning and it is nonsense. It is a meme, but it’s also the subversion of a meme. “Skibidi” can mean whatever its user wants it to mean, and it can mean nothing at all. A word that may or may not be a word — that in its resistance to meaning acquires meaning — says a lot about living life in a contested reality, and what it says isn’t great. Skibidi is real and not real, truth and untruth. Skibidi is chaos. Skibidi is what’s wrong with us.

And, unfortunately, it might have real staying power. It is a piece of what Lee Escobedo, writing in The Guardian, describes as an algorithmically fed, ever-churning “framework of meaninglessness.” It exists because it is meaningless, and it exists to be meaningless, and it encapsulates a whole system of meaning that claims to mean nothing at all. It is skibidi all the way down.

Reviewing words added to Cambridge in recent years, it turns out, reveals a lot more tension between meaning and meaninglessness. Take 2022’s “swicy,” a culinary portmanteau of, you guessed it, “sweet” and “spicy.” I have asked every foodie I know — and not for nothing, I live in Portland — whether “swicy” means anything to them, and they have said no. And not just a normal no, but a no that implies that it might be the stupidest question they’ve ever heard.

In fact, I couldn’t find any mention of “swicy” that was outside the context of announcing that “swicy” was a new buzzword. From CNN: “‘Swicy’” is the hottest trend in food right now”; from CNBC, “‘Swicy’” items take over restaurants as Gen Z seeks heat”; from MarthaStewart.com, “What Is Swicy—And Why It’s the Hottest Food Trend.” “Swicy” is a word in the sense that it has meaning, but there is no evidence that it was more than a term used to market a trend.

Cutesy marketing portmanteaus seem overrepresented in the past several years’ worth of new words, and most of them don’t pass the sniff test. Show me an instance in which “haycation” has been used by anyone who is not trying to make “haycation” a buzzword. Introduce me to a teen environmental activist who self-applies the term “greenager.” Bring out the evidence that “frolleague” is sweeping English-speaking nations. Find me one person who’s been asked “Hey, want to go ghamping next weekend?” and instantly understood it as an invitation to pitch their tent in a place known for being haunted.

I know, I know: All words are made up. But why this effort to secure a place in the dictionary for terms made up for the specific purpose of pushing trends and selling products? Cambridge claims to simply be recording words already in use, so why is it also trying to make fetch happen? Maybe it sounds pedantic, but I’d argue that this matters because the dictionaries legitimize words but do not always contextualize them. More to the point, it matters because dictionaries legitimize some words and often strip the existing context from them. Words that entered the mainstream lexicon after originating in AAVE and LGBTQ spaces and communities — among them “boo,” “bae,” “twerk,” “shade,” “tea” and, of course, “woke” were not considered “real” words when they were common and familiar; these words were associated with marginalized groups. They were added to dictionaries only after being widely appropriated by people outside those groups. Legitimizing words requires looking not just at meaning, but asking whose words have value, and who decides if they do.

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A common refrain is that dictionaries are meant to be descriptive, not prescriptive: They collect and record the words that people use, but do not dictate which words should be used. This is a lovely idea that’s also hogwash. After George W. Bush became a wartime president, many news outlets decided that the word “nuclear” — from “nucleus,” as in the center of an atom — was acceptable to pronounce as “nucular.” “Nucular” was a mispronunciation that became a word only because no one wanted to tell the president of the United States that he was wrong. That would have been deemed smug, evidence of Democratic elitism and liberal coastal bias. (In a 2001 New York Times Magazine column, William Safire noted that Bush followed Eisenhower, Carter and Clinton in stumbling on the word.)

It’s been fascinating to follow the retconning of “nucular” in the years since. Oxford English Dictionary has acknowledged it as a variant of “nuclear,” albeit one that’s “been criticized in usage guides since at least the mid-20th century.” That passive construction doesn’t specify who criticized it, but if you guessed “the dictionaries and usage guides that previously defined the word,” ding ding. Safire identified the central snag of the mispronunciation (“many who reach the Oval Office treat the first syllable as nuke”) but was confident that “This persnickety presidential pronunciation problem can be solved.”

Safire probably didn’t anticipate the solution would be to retract and rearrange all prior conventional wisdom about the word in order to not embarrass the president, but here we are. The media’s greenlighting of “nucular” was a small step in a larger pattern of disregarding facts and delegitimizing science, and it helped build the permission structure for what exists now: News outlets that treat facts like opinions, refuse to call a lie a lie, and give credence to disinformation.

Dictionaries are inherently existential, and right now they are recording words that will likely have staying power because they denote existential threats. “Real zero, “decel,” “appification” and “ragefarming” describe new norms and protocols at the intersection of technology and existence. New words that describe interpersonal manipulation (“pebbling”); new words related to environmental threats (“doomerism,” “hypertourism,” “coolcation”), new words that reflect the growing omnipresence of an industry devoted to scamming people (“hoodfishing”).

So you can kind of see why the folks at Cambridge Dictionary put “skibidi” and “delulu” on the marquee. The more time we spend laughing at and debating them as unserious and brain-rotting, the less we’re focusing on just how prescriptive some of this new language is. Its absurdity gives cover to language that conflates marketing and meaning, and frames dehumanization as inevitable. I’m not worried about the words that don’t make sense. I’m worried about the ones that do.