The Most Searched Slang of 2025: A Year-End Review of What the Internet Wanted to Know
Culture & Language Desk · January 10, 2026
2025 Roundup
Search patterns for slang terms reveal when words cross from community in-group knowledge to widespread 'I need to translate this' territory. The terms people search most are not the newest — they're the ones that have just hit a new audience.
The highest-searched slang terms of 2025 tell a consistent story: the queries peak not when a word first emerges, but when it crosses into a new demographic for the first time. Parents Google 'what does rizz mean' not in 2022 when streamers first circulated it, but in 2024–2025 when their kids started saying it at the dinner table. The search volume for any given slang term is largely a delayed indicator of mainstream crossover rather than a leading signal of a word's emergence.
Among 2025's most-searched terms: 'delulu' and 'delulu is the solulu' continued holding strong search volume from their 2024 peak, with significant query volume coming from people over 30 encountering it in workplace contexts. 'Brain rot' accelerated significantly, partly due to the Oxford Word of the Year designation in 2024 still driving discovery. 'Rizz' remained in top queries for the third consecutive year — a sign of unusual durability for a slang term. 'NPC' (both as a gaming term and as slang for someone behaving robotically) was among the year's most-searched new additions.
Terms that spiked and dropped over the course of 2025: 'demure' (following an August 2024 TikTok that spawned 'very demure, very mindful') held strong search volume through early 2025 before tapering. 'Brat' in the Charli XCX context drove significant cultural conversation in mid-2025. 'Aura' and 'aura farming' continued their long plateau suggesting genuine vocabulary staying power rather than a fleeting trend spike.
What this year's search patterns tell us about the 2026 landscape: terms that have been in high search for more than two years — rizz, aura, brain rot, delulu — are transitioning from 'slang that people look up' to 'slang that is known.' The next wave (terms currently in high search for the first time) will include whatever Gen Alpha is generating now in the gaming and streaming communities that fed the previous wave. The lead time from those spaces to widespread search queries remains roughly 18–24 months.