radar’s 2025 Word of the Year: organic encounter

We finally began craving moments that are raw, real, and most importantly, human.

It’s been five years since the COVID-19 pandemic messed all of us up. Stuck in our homes and quarantine facilities, we did everything online: work, school, businesses, events, even our hanky-panky.

Too much Facebook, Instagram, X (then called Twitter), Zoom, Google Meet, Discord, Viber, Telegram, Bumble, Tinder, Grindr, and whatever platform that could float boats. Screens became our refuge—and our prison. And we were connected, sure, but only through pixels, reaction buttons, DMs, and emojis. Life felt too curated, scheduled, and filtered. In other words—hollow. And then there’s AI, reinforcing the notion of artifice over humanity.

While things eased gradually in the latter years, 2025 was like a typhoon that hit the Philippines. Literally, with storms and floods, and metaphorically, with oversaturation just battering the chronically online denizens. After so much screen time, we finally began craving moments that are raw, real, and most importantly, human.

We started revisiting how to be a community where its members actually show up for each other. Neighbors acted like it. Strangers extended helping hands without being asked. Friends reunited in cafes, restaurants, beaches, bars, and concert grounds. Life began happening off-screen again in all its messy, unpredictable glory. Was it a conversation struck up at a P-pop concert? A random burst of laughter shared in a long queue? A smile from someone across the room? Nothing engineered. Nothing filtered. Just life happening as it is.

That’s why radar is picking “organic encounter” as our 2025 Word of the Year.

Major dictionaries don’t have an entry for it yet, but the crowdsourced Urban Dictionary defines it as a moment “when you meet a person in real life by chance—like at a café, grocery store, gym, hospital, school, or during daily routines—instead of through dating apps, blind dates, or intentional matchmaking.” Outside of romance, it’s simply those serendipitous moments we share with people as we live our lives.

“Organic encounter” started popping up online around early November, but it has retroactively captured everything about the last five years of pandemic-driven isolation—and how 2025 reminded us of our humanity.

For award-winning humor writer Jade Mark Capiñanes, though, organic encounter could pass off for something, um, scatological. Something that happens to all of us, binds us, and shows how utterly and truly human we are. Something that no online platform can encapsulate and no AI can imitate.

Will 2026 see more organic encounters, in every sense of the word? Log off, get up, and find out.

 

 

“Organic encounter” became popular online in early November.

 

 

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