"Hallucineren" chosen as Van Dale's word of 2025 as AI gives term new meaning
The editors of Van Dale have chosen “hallucineren” as the Word of the Year 2025. According to the dictionary, artificial intelligence has given the word, Dutch for “hallucinating,” a new meaning.
Generative AIs are said to hallucinate when they provide incorrect or inaccurate information. In this context, the word means: providing information that is not based on (reliable) data and is therefore inaccurate or completely false, Van Dale said.
“Hallucineren is not a new word, but it recently acquired this meaning,” Van Dale said, adding that the new meaning became common in 2025 thanks to the increasingly widespread use of generative language models like ChatGPT and Gemini. “We chose this word because it reflects an important development in society and in language.”
This is the second year that Van Dale has chosen the Word of the Year itself. Until last year, the word was chosen through a vote. But last year’s vote was hijacked by “various activist groups calling for votes on certain words,” so the dictionary editors chose the word themselves. It was “polarisatie,” which translates to polarization in English.
