Rizz, and the Modern Pursuit of Charm

"Rizz" is slang for charm, especially a knack for attracting a romantic interest through flirtation and easy confidence. The word is a clipped form of charisma, filed down to a single syllable by the young, and it spread from around 2022 through a popular streamer whose sayings the rest took up the way a hedgerow of starlings will seize on a single note. From the beginning it was treated as a quantity, a thing one might carry in abundance or scarcely at all.

Its moment of respectability came in 2023, when Oxford University Press, an outfit not given to sudden excitements, named rizz its word of the year. By then the term had branched into useful forms, the way a healthy plant sends out new shoots. To approach another with intent, armed with rehearsed lines and a studied show of indifference, is to be rizzing them up, a display close in spirit to the patient circling seen in the courtship of birds. The most admired variety, the unspoken rizz, needs no words at all, the lucky party drawing the eye simply by sitting still and being pleasant to look upon.

The word now travels well past romance, fastening onto any successful show of charm, whether a small child prising a second pudding from a parent or a colleague coaxing loose a favour. Under the fresh vocabulary lies a very old instinct, the plain wish to be wanted, brought out again each season like the first green of spring. It is the sort of display one could watch for hours from the far side of the garden fence, the whole business carrying on contentedly, quite unaware of being observed.