2023·Short-form and streams·funny
Rizz
The word for charm that went from a streamer's slang to Oxford's word of the year in about eighteen months.
You might remember it as unspoken rizz
A saying
- SourceNo single original
- MediaNot held by ViralWorld
What this was
Rizz means charm, style, the ability to attract someone — most likely a clipping of charisma. It has grammar: you can have rizz, you can rizz somebody up, you can possess unspoken rizz, which is charm requiring no words at all. It spread out of Twitch and TikTok through 2022 and was ubiquitous by 2023.
It first appeared in 2023, during short-form and streams.
It is the cleanest recent case of the pipeline from a small streaming community to global English. Oxford University Press named it word of the year for 2023, which is itself the story: a piece of slang that most people over thirty had to have explained to them was, within a year, the officially designated word of the year in the language.
The word has stuck, unusually — most slang of this speed is gone within a season. It also produced its own backlash genre, the deliberately unfunny corporate use, and a durable joke format about whether anybody claiming rizz can be said to have it.
Short-form and streams
- The GameStop short squeeze 2021Short-form and streams
- FoodTok 2021Short-form and streams
- Noodle 2021Short-form and streams
- Doggface208 Dreams video 2020Short-form and streams
- Hawk Tuah 2024Short-form and streams
- Moo Deng 2024Short-form and streams
- Sigma Boy 2024Short-form and streams
- AI slop 2024Short-form and streams
- Grimace Shake 2023Short-form and streams
- Skibidi Toilet 2023Short-form and streams
Related
- Bones or No Bones 2021Short-form and streams
- Looking for a Man in Finance 2024Short-form and streams
- Brain rot 2024Short-form and streams
- Among Us 2020Short-form and streams
- Listenbourg 2022Short-form and streams
- Four Seasons Total Landscaping 2020Short-form and streams
- M to the B 2020Short-form and streams
- Girl Cries After Calling 911 Accidentally (@linyiahaa) 2024Short-form and streams
Grouped by explicit relationships where evidence exists, and by shared theme otherwise.
Behind the recordWhere it came from
There is no original to identify: this spread through many separate posts at once rather than from a first one. ViralWorld holds no copy of it either — what it was, when it spread and what people called it is the record.
Nothing here is claimed to be the first version of this, because research established there was not one — it appeared in many places at once.
Not established. This index only names a creator where the evidence supports it.
- What happens
- Rizz means charm, style, the ability to attract someone — most likely a clipping of charisma. It has grammar: you can have rizz, you can rizz somebody up, you can possess unspoken rizz, which is charm requiring no words at all. It spread out of Twitch and TikTok through 2022 and was ubiquitous by 2023.