Of the 180 picks on China's three best-known annual lists of internet buzzwords (网络流行语) from 2020 to 2025, one term is a pinyin abbreviation of the yyds kind, and none is a number pun like 520. By our coding, the biggest groups are new compounds, 57 of the 180, and old words given a new sense, 49. That count describes the lists as much as the slang: the editors of one of them said in 2019 that they do not take homophone puns and generally do not take abbreviations made of pinyin letters.
Three panels drew up the lists by different methods
The National Language Resources Monitoring and Research Center publishes a yearly top ten from a monitored corpus of online text, which its network-media branch describes as 「以智能信息处理技术为主，兼顾领域专家意见和搜索引擎收录情况」: mostly automated processing, with expert opinion and search-engine data alongside. The language magazine 《咬文嚼字》 picks its own ten through reader nominations, online votes and a panel of experts and media. The third list, from the Shanghai weekly 《语言文字周报》, also runs from reader nomination through an online vote to expert review. On 12 December 2025 the centre's list and the weekly's came out the same day, and The Paper noted that they shared a single entry, ××基础××不基础.
The lists are not all slang. By our count, 13 of the centre's 60 picks from 2020 to 2025 are government policy terms, such as 双减 and 新质生产力, as are 13 of the magazine's. The weekly has one; in 2021 and 2022 it published such terms on a separate list. The lists also take positions. The centre's 2021 release, which listed 躺平, "lying flat", described it in its own words as 「只当是奋斗征途中的小憩」, a short rest on the road of striving rather than a way of life.
The panels picked a single pinyin abbreviation and no number puns
Much of the most recognisable Chinese internet slang is built from sound and letters. yyds is the pinyin initials of 永远的神, "eternal god", said of someone brilliant. 520 stands for 我爱你, "I love you", because the numbers sound roughly like the words in Mandarin, and 666 praises a smooth move because 六 sounds like 溜. 555, crying, works as a pun only in Mandarin, where 五 (wǔ) sounds like 呜 (wū); in Cantonese 五 is read ng5.
Across the 180 picks, yyds is the only pinyin abbreviation, chosen by two of the lists in 2021. Eleven picks contain any Latin letter at all, and they come to eight terms: yyds, PUA (an English acronym), 村BA, City不City, DeepSeek, emo, 栓Q and i人/e人, where the i and e are the introvert and extrovert of personality tests, not pinyin. No pick is a number pun. The last number-shaped entries, in 2019, were labels for 996 working hours rather than sound puns.
Until 30 September 2026, our internet slang decoder cited a netspeak dictionary we could not find in any catalogue, and five of the seven terms it holds in Traditional characters found nothing when typed that way. It now cites two of the annual lists instead, and finds each term from either script.
One panel's editors ruled out puns and letter abbreviations
The weekly's executive editor, 杨林成, set out the exclusions when the 2019 list came out: 「源于谐音的热词不收」, buzzwords that come from homophones are not taken, and 「缩写拼音的字母词一般不收」, letter words abbreviated from pinyin generally are not, naming awsl and zqsg among them. In 2020, the weekly said 网抑云 was left out as a homophone joke with too little 语文智慧, linguistic wit.
The rule bent. The weekly's 2021 release took yyds under the heading 「yyds可以选」, and it also took the homophone 夺笋 that year and 栓Q in 2022. The magazine and the centre have published no comparable rule that we found. So the absence of number puns and the single yyds say something about what three panels were willing to count, and less about how people online write.
Magazine editors filed 内卷 under new usage
《咬文嚼字》 sorted its own 2020 picks by how they were made: some were 新结构, new structures; some, like 后浪, spread with 新的含义, a new meaning; and 打工人 and 内卷 were 在用法上都有所创新, new in how they were used. The magazine traced 内卷 to the English "involution", 本是社会学术语, originally a sociology term, which spread in the second half of 2020 after photos of students reading or using laptops while riding bicycles. Its 2021 release traced 破防, "defences broken", to online games, and said it now mostly means having one's emotional defences give way. It explained 鸡娃, pushing a child hard, as a clipping of 给孩子打鸡血, giving a child a shot of chicken blood.
Our own coding of all 180 picks, by the main way each was formed, puts 57 as new compounds or clippings, 49 as old words with new senses, 29 as whole catchphrases, 18 as slot patterns such as 一种很新的××, and the rest as names, loans, homophones, abbreviations and established terms. The magazine's own 2020 sorting matches ours on eight of its ten picks.
The list-makers repeated 内卷 and little else
Across 270 entries, the centre's list from 2012 to 2025, the magazine's from 2020 and the weekly's from its first year, 2019, only one term was picked again by the same list. The weekly took 内卷 in 2020 and 卷/内卷 in 2021, and said the repeat showed the word was 再度上榜, on the list a second time. Five terms reached a second list in a later year. Four of those started on the magazine's list, among them 新质生产力 and 情绪价值, and one, 主理人, went from the centre's 2024 list to the weekly's in 2025.
Nine terms made all three lists in the same year, including 躺平 and 破防 in 2021 and 显眼包 and 特种兵旅游 in 2023. In December 2024 a commentary first carried by 红网 and republished on Xinhuanet reported readers finding several of that year's picks not very popular and suggested the organisers could choose fewer than ten.
Dictionary editors took 秒杀 and 给力 into the sixth edition
A researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences' lexicography centre, writing in 光明日报 in December 2025, said the sixth edition of the 《现代汉语词典》, the standard dictionary of modern Chinese, took in 秒杀 and 给力, and gave four tests a new word must pass, starting with 填补义位空缺, filling a gap in meaning. The publisher's 顾青 told 北京日报 in April 2026 that the seventh edition, from 2016, added words such as 点赞 and 颜值, and that the eighth was still being revised.
The larger 《现代汉语大词典》, launched in April 2026, includes 元宇宙 and 新质生产力, both list words, and according to the National Press and Publication Administration 「有生命力的网络词语也在收录之列」, internet words with staying power, such as 梗 and 破圈. We found no source saying any dictionary has taken yyds, 躺平, 内卷 or 破防.
Wikipedia's readers lost interest in 躺平 within two months
Chinese Wikipedia is blocked in mainland China, so its page views come mostly from outside the mainland, and they measure curiosity rather than use. With that caveat, we took monthly Wikimedia page-view counts for five articles that existed when their term peaked.
| Article | Peak month | Months until below a quarter of the peak | 2025 views as a share of the peak year |
|---|---|---|---|
| 躺平 | June 2021 | 2 | 10.8% |
| 996工作制 | April 2019 | 2 | 30.6% |
| 元宇宙 | November 2021 | 4 | 4.3% |
| 内卷化 | June 2021 | 7 | 31.9% |
| 佛系 | June 2018 | 8 | 7.7% |
The 躺平 article was created in May 2021 and drew 168,180 views in June, and by August it was below a quarter of that. 内卷化 is the one article whose views rose again, to 148,009 in 2024 from 101,076 in 2023.
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