This year we’re going ‘Goblin mode’ with Oxford Dictionary’s blessing

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‘I’ve gone goblin mode’: couch-bound in PJs, the Oxford English Dictionary lexicographers capture the mood of 2022.

The end is nigh for 2022, and while many try to keep their head above water Oxford lexicographers say sink into your less gracious side.

‘Goblin mode’ has been awarded the 2022 Oxford Word of the Year (WOTY), a tribute to humans preferring to reject social norms and expectations in favour of “unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly, or greedy” behaviour.

“It’s a zeitgeist thing. People are just going to live how they want to live,” senior researcher from Australian National Dictionary Centre (Oxford English Dictionary’s Australian edition) Mark Gwynn said.

“Whatever is going in the world, they’re just going to hang out as a picture-perfect version of themselves in their uggs and shorts and say: ‘I’ve gone goblin mode today.’”

The term was on a shortlist of three compiled by Oxford and put to the public in a dictionary first. More than 340,000 voted between the winning word and runners-up ‘metaverse’ and ‘#IStandWith’. It was nothing short of a landslide with “goblin mode” securing 93% of the vote.

Associate professor in linguistics at Macquarie University Annabelle Lukin says the choice indicated a desire to validate cultural habits by giving them names — a particularly pandemic-related predilection. Terms such as ‘social distancing’, ‘antisocial distancing’ (which Lukin describes as “using lockdown to avoid seeing people you don’t like”), ‘quarantinis’ (cocktails made from whatever random ingredients you have at home) and ‘Covidiots’ (someone not taking the pandemic seriously) all fit the bill.

So what does goblin mode have going for itself?

Oxford University Press traces the word back to 2009 when a Twitter user described a sugar-induced high as “full hyperactive goblin mode”. The term relaunched in 2021 with a new sense of self, but it was not until February this year that it went viral with the award-winning definition. A doctored headline falsely claimed actor Julia Fox and musician Kanye West were no longer because of Fox’s tendency to go ‘goblin mode’.

And so began circulation of an apt term used to reject a return to normality. (The Collins Dictionary put our rosy reality into perspective earlier this year when it declared “permacrisis” WOTY.)

This article is reproduced from our sister publication Crikey.