“Do I look a bit like ‘Liz’?”… Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year

Britain’s Oxford English Dictionary (OED) selected the new word ‘rizz’, which means charm that attracts people’s hearts, as its ‘Word of the Year’.

According to the American daily New York Times (NYT) on the 3rd (local time), this word, first recorded last year, is a new word derived from ‘charisma’, which means a strong charm that captivates people.

There is also an interpretation that it is an abbreviation for ‘romantic charisma’, which mainly refers to the attraction shown towards the opposite sex or sexual objects. It is closer to the meaning of hidden charm rather than simply being handsome or pretty.

For example, in sentences, it is mainly used as a noun, such as “He has a ‘rizz’,” but it can also be used as a verb, meaning “to radiate charm or talent, to seduce” (rizz up).

According to the OED, the new word ‘Liz’, meaning charm, began to gain popularity in June of this year when British actor Tom Holland (27), famous for his role as ‘Spider-Man’, used it in an interview.

“I don’t have a ‘Liz’ at all,” Holland told BuzzFeed at the time. “There is only a limited number of ‘Leeds’,” he said.

Afterwards, the interview video became a meme (popular content on the Internet) and spread rapidly, and according to OED data analysis, the usage of ‘Liz’ increased about 15 times after that.

Oxford Dictionary’s ‘Word of the Year’ is selected by judging the usability of more than 22 billion words or phrases collected from news materials from English-speaking countries around the world.

The words nominated for word of the year along with ‘Liz’ are ‘Swiftie’, which refers to the fandom of American pop star Taylor Swift, and ‘de-influencer’, which is an act that negatively affects the sales of a specific product. (de-influencing), and ‘prompt’, which refers to work instructions or commands entered into an artificial intelligence (AI) program.

Meanwhile, ‘rizz’ selected by the OED has the same Korean spelling as ‘Leeds’, which in Korea means the ‘heyday’ of celebrities or middle-aged people, but the spelling and English pronunciation, including the meaning, are all the same. different.

The term Leeds, which refers to the heyday, originally referred to the time when a specific player from the English professional soccer team ‘Leeds United’ was active, but its meaning has expanded.