‘Bouncy pork’ and ‘clown bus’: The new words that went viral overseas​on February 6, 2025 at 6:30 pm

Politics. Climate. Money. All the usual suspects, plus a plump hippo and bashful javelin champ. Just a glimpse of the Other Words of the Year, those terms picked by offshore dictionaries, away from the dominance of English. Why should Oxford hog the light? Macquarie and Merriam-Webster? Before 2025 gets too old, let’s see which alternative coinages captured the global year that was.

In Denmark, say, the winner was Fedtemøg (literally fat-dung), a scum that’s plaguing fjords, fed by the sea’s depleted oxygen. Couple this with Klovnebus (clown-bus), a jocular label for the new liberal party, and you sense every nation has a story to tell.

In Germany, the equivalent is a broken traffic light, or Ampel-Aus. This alludes to the Social Democratic Party, called the traffic-light coalition due to its colour scheme. However, given the party’s recent implosion, Ampel-Aus won out. Other Deutsch darlings were Kriegstüchtig (war-ready, re: Ukraine) and Angstsparen (saving money out of fear).

In China, the shortlist was drafted by Shanghai’s Yaowen Jiaozi, a magazine translating as “biting phrases and chewing characters”. Salient themes were AI – or Shuzhihua, or digital intelligence – and the rise of Gen-Z, with terms like Xiaohai Ge (young but talented people) and Yinfa Liliang (literally “silver-hair power”) seeming to jostle.

Shades of Gen Z-stagiair (or “Gen Z-intern”) in Dutch, a youth recruited to generate ideas and decode online language. Unlike a Profnar (“professional jester”) who’s hired to dispel Burn-outbureaucratie – another shortlister. Though the top Dutch word was Polarisatie (polarisation), reflecting the jump in divisive politics, a few points ahead of Koeltekloof (“cooling gap”), being the socio-economic privilege of air-con.

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Volcanoes stole the show in Iceland. Restless, the craters have erupted into new phrases, endowing Óróapúls (tremor pulse), Gosmóða (volcanic haze) and Sprunguhreyfingar (fissure movements) into the local vocab. Though the 2024 winner salvages a retardant method from the past, giving Hraunkæling (lava-cooling) a retro-chic.

Disaster in general flavoured several lexicons. In Swiss German, Murgang (or debris-flow) embodies the deadly combo of floods and landslides in towns like Brienz. Akin to dana in Spain, a sinister acronym underlying those Valencia deluges, standing for Depresión Aislada en Niveles Altos, or otherwise: Isolated Depression at High Levels. While a collapsed awning at Novi Sad railway station, an event killing 15 people, foisted Nadstrešnica (canopy) onto the podium, the term now vital shorthand for governmental blame-dodging.

Over in Japan, Haruka Kitaguchi won the population’s hearts twice over. Not only did the javelin champ win Japan’s first gold in track and field in 20 years, her response to the press was just as prized, apologising “for being unable to come up with an appropriate inspirational phrase” to celebrate her win. Hence her name is synonymous with ill-prepared glory, a little like we have our own Steve Bradbury to cherish.