‘Hallucination’ is elected by Van Dale to the Word of the Year 2025. It is not a new word, but it took on a new meaning at a time of large-scale implementation of AI language models, the publisher’s jury explains. In that context, Van Dale defines hallucination as “providing information that is not based on (reliable) data and that is therefore inaccurate or completely incorrect.”
According to Van Dale, the new meaning of the word is common due to the “wide adoption of AI applications, such as ChatGPT and Gemini”. The word was chosen “because it reflects an important development in society and in language.”
Van Dale chose the Word of the Year himself this year, without input from society, “given the experiences of recent years”. Last year the election for the Word of the Year was withdrawn. According to Van Dale, the election was then hijacked by action groups, causing a “very unpleasant social discussion”. That is why the publisher itself chose the word: polarization.
Some of last year’s ten nominations led to intensely polarizing discussions on social media. In particular, the words pager attack (referring to Israel’s attack on Hezbollah in September 2024), transition regret (regret that transgender people in rare cases have about their transition) and Gen Z trainee (young trainees who use incomprehensible jargon for older colleagues).
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