China’s 2025 buzzwords spotlight AI, life-style, and social traits

2025-12-03 Ecns.cn Editor：Zhang Jiahao

(ECNS) — China’s language journal Yaowen-Jiaozi has launched its annual record of the highest 10 buzzwords of 2025. The high three are “resilience,” “embodied intelligence” and “suchao,” a grassroots soccer league in Jiangsu Province that has grown right into a nationwide phenomenon.

Other entries embrace “cyber reconciliation,” describing Chinese and American netizens cross-checking private experiences on-line; “digital nomads,” referring to location-independent professionals; and “guzi,” a phonetic borrowing of “goods” that displays the booming marketplace for anime and gaming merchandise.

The record additionally options “prefabricated XX”; “huoren gan,” that means a “real-person vibe”; and “basic A, non-basic B,” a humorous phrase contrasting the easy with the unexpectedly extravagant. It concludes with a playful couplet contrasting a state of being “calm, composed and masterful” with one among “rushing about, tumbling and scrambling,” first utilized by Taiwanese lawmaker Wang Shih-chien throughout a council inquiry on authorities inefficiency.

Huang Anjing, editor-in-chief of Yaowen-Jiaozi, mentioned that choice of the phrases adopted the publication’s long-standing “dual criteria” strategy, weighing each sociological relevance and linguistic worth. Analyzing this 12 months’s version, Huang famous that synthetic intelligence is leaving a rising imprint on the Chinese language, whereas financial and life-style shifts—reminiscent of industrial upgrading and extra numerous employment patterns—have impressed new phrases like “guzi” and “digital nomad.”

Language, Huang mentioned, is a “window into public sentiment”. Expressions reminiscent of “basic A, non-basic B” seize the on a regular basis emotional values of abnormal individuals, providing a “snapshot of life” as lived throughout Chinese society right now.

(By Zhang Jiahao)

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