A Word About "Rizz"

By Malakhi Beyah, 2025

Published 12/30/2023

“Rizz” joins the extensive list of catchy, yet probably short-lived, Internet slang. Photo courtesy of Creative Enabler.

On December 4, 2023, Oxford announced that “rizz” had claimed the title of Word of the Year, outcompeting “Swiftie”, “prompt”, and “situationship.” This announcement did not come as a surprise to most people; “rizz” has been dominating conversations, texts, and social media reels for quite some time. It has become well-established as a popular punchline, a playful term to boost self-confidence, and something of a standard among younger generations. However, it is all too common to “rizz people up” and compliment “W rizz” without having a complete understanding of the word, bringing the legitimacy of its newfound popularity into question.

The roots of rizz can be traced back to 2021 in the streets of New York City. Social media influencer Kai Cenat would joke with his close friends about having “rizz," short for “charisma”. Cenat defined “rizz” as the ability to have someone disinterested (or even disgusted) with you ultimately fall in love with you. Eventually, Cenat began using the term in his Twitch streams to poke fun at himself and others. While his followers initially did not approve of the strange new word, “rizz” did not take long to take the rest of the Internet by storm. The term’s end as a niche word was cemented when Tom Holland famously claimed in a Buzzfeed interview to have “no rizz whatsoever.”

However, as Cenat later stated on the No Jumper podcast, by the time “rizz” had expanded past Twitch and into TikTok, “[People] butchered that word. They killed it.” Aside from putting various goofy spins on the word (such as “the master rizzler,” “a PhD in rizz-onomics,” and “L rizz”), Cenat claimed that people had strayed from his original definition of the term. He intended for it to describe underdogs who have to put effort into finding love, but social media has besmirched the word into describing the complete opposite: people who put little effort into finding love and have great success at it regardless. In other words, “rizz” went from meaning “innocent charisma” to “natural game.” 

It is unlikely that people will go back to using “rizz” the way it was originally meant to be used. It might not matter, anyway; “rizzing people up” could die down as a trend pretty quickly. Even though some popular Internet terms are used enough to become part of common speech, many just fade into obscurity after their brief period of popularity. “Locavore”, “hypermiling”, “post-truth”, and “youthquake”, all of which were former Oxford Words of the Year, serve as relics of once-popular Internet terms that did not stay relevant forever. “Rizz” is likely to meet the same fate in the near future. Nevertheless, regardless of what the future holds, the present continues to have no shortage of “rizzlers.”