Trying to Make Sense of 'Rizz,' Oxford's Word of the Year for 2023

So you think you have rizz? To the common millennial (ouch), it feels like such an unserious word. The under-30s of the world have decided that we must honor its colloquial cache. But it is serious, serious enough to be named Oxford's Word of the Year for 2023. Hell, the term beat out contenders like "prompt," "situationship," and even "Swiftie." Funny enough, it's one of those words whose etymology seems to be attributed to viral TikTok and Twitter verbiage.

It's a verb, a noun, and a slang phenomenon. Dictionary.com defines Rizz as a slang term for someone's alleged skill in charming or seducing potential partners verbally. It can also mean an innate ability to exude charisma without necessarily communicating verbally. All about confidence and body language.

Rizz in a sentence:

"He's not the most handsome guy in the world, but his rizz is something else."

Some more rizz:

"I'm about to rizz her up."

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It's taken on a new cultural significance as of late, representing a linguistic revolution. It's widely accepted that it comes from the word "charisma," as Tom Hanks and even Marty Scorsese once noted in interviews and TikToks (God bless, Fracesca). It's a word that especially makes sense in the age of hypersexualization and the reduction of our lingo (coinciding with the nuggets of knowledge this generation is accustomed to thanks to TikTok). This formation pattern isn't unusual either. After all, "fridge" was once just "refrigerator" and "flu" was once just "influenza."

When Oxford celebrates its Word of the Year, it finds “a word or expression that reflects the past twelve months in some way, having potential as a term of lasting cultural significance or providing a snapshot of social history.” Thus, the legacy of rizz.

“Given that last year ‘goblin mode’ resonated with so many of us after the pandemic, it’s interesting to see a contrasting word like rizz come to the forefront," Oxford Languages President Casper Grathwohl explains, "perhaps speaking to a prevailing mood of 2023, where more of us are opening ourselves up after a challenging few years and finding confidence in who we are.”

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There's not exactly a peer-reviewed study for the origins of "rizz." But it's mainstreaming is something we can somewhat trace.

We can perhaps say that "rizz" had a grip on the zeitgeist in the aftermath of streamers, particularly Kai Cenat, who is said to have mainstreamed the term. It's a reference to African-American culture, really. Neologisms such as Rizz always tend to start off as a funny way to punctuate a thought or a line. Cenat notoriously said rizz on the No Jumper podcast a while back. Although Cenat does point out that TikTok sort of killed rizz's, er, rizz. “They butchered that word. They killed it," he would declare.

It even reached our celebrities. Zendaya once said that Tom Holland had "limited rizz." Timothée Chalamet once hilariously called Holland "The Ultimate Rizz Master," as well. What is it with tight-lipped British dudes, aye? Tinder would also claim to have done a "rizz-first" redesign.

“Rizz is a term that has boomed on social media and speaks to how language that enjoys intense popularity and currency within particular social communities — and even in some cases lose their popularity and become passé — can bleed into the mainstream,” added Gratwohl. “This is a story as old as language itself, but stories of linguistic evolution and expansion that used to take years can now take weeks or months.”

This year, it's "rizz." In a few months, it's going to be a different foreign slang nobody but Gen Zs get. The term might be a little too mainstream by then. Better buckle up.