Dictionary.com picked 'maxxing' as its word of 2026. Will Oxford pick it too?

What happened

Dictionary.com named ‘maxxing’ its word of the year for 2026, after digital media used it nearly 19 times more in August than in an average month of 2025.

Dictionary.com named ‘maxxing’ its word of the year for 2026 on 26 October. The American website found that digital media used the word nearly 19 times more in August 2026 than in an average month of 2025. Short for maximising, it can be added to the end of other words, as in ‘sleepmaxxing’, to mean doing something as fully as possible.

Linguist Kelly Wright told the Guardian that the word will stay, because “Middle-aged people really love this word. Corporate brands love this word.“ Other linguists told the paper it is hard to predict.

The big British dictionaries name their words later in the year. In 2025 Collins chose ‘vibe coding’ on 6 November and Cambridge chose ‘parasocial’ on 18 November. Oxford University Press came last, with ‘rage bait’ on 30 November. None of them has given a date for 2026, and on 28 October the Oxford and Cambridge pages still showed 2025.

The Oxford Word of the Year can be a singular word or expression, which our lexicographers think of as a single unit of meaning.

Oxford University Press, word of the year page for 2025

Oxford chooses with its own data on how often words are used. In 2025 its experts put three words to a public vote, and more than 30,000 people took part over three days. The experts then chose ‘rage bait’, which was used three times more than a year before.

Sources: bbc.co.uk

The Pattern

We looked for cases where Oxford named its word of the year after another big English dictionary had already named its own word that year. We found ten such years, from 2015 to 2025, and in each of them Collins went before Oxford.

The Read

In nine of those ten years Oxford chose a word of its own. Words from other dictionaries often reached its list, though. In 2016 ‘Brexiteer’ was on it, 12 days after Collins chose ‘Brexit’, and in 2025 ‘aura farming’ and ‘biohack’ were on it after Collins listed ‘aura farming’ and ‘biohacking’. The one time Oxford named the same word was 2020, when it named many ‘Words of an Unprecedented Year’ and ‘lockdown’ was one of them.

This year is different in two ways. The first dictionary to choose is American, and that happened before only in 2025, when Dictionary.com picked ‘6-7’. ‘Maxxing’ is also an ending that joins other words, and no earlier first word of the year was like that. Each time it was the same publisher deciding: Oxford University Press. Since 2022 Oxford has let the public vote on its list, and in those four years the other dictionaries’ words never won.