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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Pamela Duncan, Carmen Aguilar García and Philip McMahon

Rizz, Barbenheimer and hallucination: the breakthrough words in the Guardian in 2023

Fusion of human head and fractal shapes
There was an explosion in the use of the word ‘hallucination’, defined by the Cambridge dictionary as false information produced by generative AI tools. Photograph: Andrew Ostrovsky/Alamy

Hallucination, Barbenheimer and acabó were among the new and breakthrough words of 2023, according to an analysis of the Guardian archive. And do you have “rizz”?

Dozens of new words appeared on the newspaper’s pages this year. And while the majority of these relate to people and placenames previously unrecorded on the news pages, some words were truly newly minted.

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