The world of work often brings with it its own jargonish set of slang and buzzwords, and 2025 was no different.
With AI technology becoming increasingly a part of many people’s everyday work, alongside all the other everyday experiences of the average workday, its use was reflected in many of the year’s most buzzworthy buzzwords, as reported by Kick Resume — the origins and meanings of just some of which are explored here.
The editorial team at Merriam-Webster crowned slop as its Word of the Year for 2025, defining it as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.”
Likewise, many other dictionaries were required to update their definition of the word to reflect its use as a byword for computer-generated “sloppy” content.
Workslop is a nice work-oriented pun on both AI slop content and in-office workshopping, defined as low-quality AI-produced work that proves so shoddily made that it only creates more work for the rest of the team. This productivity-destroying AI garbage was called out by a widely circulated survey by Harvard Business Review in the autumn of 2025 (among several others that year), helping establish the term firmly in office workers’ vocabulary the world over.
Spamming employers and recruitment websites with hundreds of copies of your resumé in the hopes of securing more interviews became known as spamplication this year. The growing adoption of AI not only made this possible in 2025, it also streamlined the resumé-writing and cover letter-writing process — but in the process, made the act of hiring staff and filtering applications more time-consuming for employers.
Since the pandemic, many people’s workdays have become more flexible, with remote work from home becoming more commonplace, and microshifting becoming an increasingly popular means of breaking up the working day. The term — which refers to working several shorter, flexible periods throughout the day, as opposed to a single long shift — proved a buzzword in 2025 as how we work continued to evolve.
Similar to microshifting, coffee badging was another new workplace trend in 2025, in which workers turn up at the office, swipe with their badge, grab a cup of coffee and catchup with colleagues, and then head home to work remotely for the rest of the day.
With a recent study finding that more than two-thirds of workers would start looking for a new position if forced to return to the office more often suggests that coffee badging may well have emerged in 2025 as a kind of employee pushback among growing return-to-work mandates.
A euphemism for holding down several different jobs at once, poly-employment emerged in 2025 both as a response to the ongoing cost of living crisis and, somewhat more positively, among Millennials and Gen Z-ers who are seeking more variety and diversity in their working lives.
Rather than holding down multiple jobs simultaneously, some younger Gen Z-ers landed a reputation as “office frogs” in 2025, as they instead embraced a career path involving continually shifting from one job to another in search of better pay, conditions, and work-life balance.
The opposite trend, of sticking with a job for a long time, alternatively, has become known as “job hugging.”
Also known as “ghost vacationing” and “workcations,” hush-tripping is the increasingly common (and somewhat shady) workplace practice of taking time off, without informing your employer.
The growing ability of workers to work remotely is chiefly responsible for the trend, with employees still clocking in and joining calls and meetings online, only while away rather than at home. Taking this practice to the extreme and remaining away from work permanently while traveling, meanwhile, has been dubbed “digital nomadism.”
Somewhere in between the usual 9-to-5 workday and the impossible-to-maintain 24-7 lifestyle is 9-9-6 work. The term has emerged this year amid increasing workday pressures, demanding longer shifts and more hours from employees, creating a situation in which workers are expected to be available or clock in to their work or online calls any time from 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m., six days a week.
If your work isn’t quite as full on as a 9-9-6 job, however, then you may well have been experiencing boreout, rather than burnout, in 2025. This “syndrome” refers to work or employment that is uninspiring, unchallenging, and unacknowledged, leading to workers feeling utterly detached and unmotivated by their jobs.
According to Forbes, on-site gyms and gaming rooms, flexible hours and vacations, and even team-building exercises have all been labelled as “anti-perks” this year — a term for workplace features and amenities sold as positives that some workers might instead find off-putting or distracting.
Team-building away days, for instance, might sound like a chance to meet other workmates more casually and take a break from the office, but they can also prove distracting, time-consuming, and ultimately unnecessary.
Workplace features like gyms and games rooms, meanwhile, can blur the line between work and personal life, while flexible hours and contracts can lead to some employees feeling uncertain about how much time off is acceptable, and ultimately feeling like they cannot take as much vacation time as they might otherwise do.
