Rizz

Rizz is slang for charm, specifically the ability to attract someone, usually with words and usually without visibly trying. Flirting is what you do. Rizz is how well it lands, and the other person decides that. Oxford made it Word of the Year in 2023.

Updated October 4, 2026

Means

Charm, the ability to attract someone

First seen

2021 (Kai Cenat's livestreams; Dictionary.com cites a tweet of June 12, 2021); Oxford Word of the Year 2023

Related terms

Talking stage, Green flags, Red flags, Love bombing, Situationship

In Swedish

Rizz

As a word, rizz is about five years old and has already collected a dictionary entry, a Word of the Year title and an argument about where it came from. The thing it describes is a good deal older.

Signs someone has rizz (and what is only a line)

Rizz is graded by the audience. Watch the person on the receiving end, not the one doing the talking.

• The other person is doing most of the laughing. They lean in, stay for another drink and stop checking their phone.
• Questions get follow-ups. Someone with rizz asks, listens, and brings the answer back twenty minutes later.
• The attention is specific. It is about this person, tonight, not a compliment that would fit anyone in the room.
• A no is taken calmly. No sulking, no second attempt disguised as a joke. This is where rizz and manipulation part ways. Intense warmth that turns sour the moment it meets resistance is closer to love bombing.

A line is only a line if it would work on anyone. Pickup lines are written in advance for whoever happens to be standing there. Rizz cannot be prepared that way, because it depends on who is standing there.

Where rizz comes from

Kai Cenat, a Twitch streamer, popularized the word on his livestreams in 2021. Dictionary.com cites a tweet from June 12, 2021 as an early written example (Dictionary.com). By 2022 it had spread on TikTok. In June 2023 the actor Tom Holland said in an interview that he had “limited rizz,” and use of the word peaked around then (Oxford Languages, 2023).

On December 4, 2023, Oxford Languages announced rizz as its Word of the Year. A public vote of more than 32,000 people cut an expert shortlist of eight to four finalists, and Oxford’s lexicographers picked the winner. The shortlist also included situationship and beige flag (Oxford Languages, 2023).

Oxford calls rizz a middle clipping of charisma: the middle of the word survives and the ends go, the same way fridge came from refrigerator (Oxford Languages, 2023). Cenat disagrees. He has said the word meant “game” and came from his group of friends, not from charisma (Complex, July 2023), and that TikTok “butchered” it (Complex, December 2023). According to Wiktionary, the linguists Kelly Wright and Ben Zimmer noted that denial in the journal American Speech in 2023. We have not read the American Speech piece itself, so treat that part as secondhand. The dispute is open. The dictionary has the tidier explanation. The streamer has the closer claim.

Rizz vs flirting, charisma and confidence

People swap these four words freely. They overlap, but they describe different things.

Flirting is a behavior. Eye contact, teasing, a hand on an arm. You can do it well or badly.

Charisma is a broad quality, used about leaders and performers as much as dates. Researchers do not even agree on how to define it. One review called it “an ill-defined and ill-measured gift” (Antonakis et al., 2016).

Confidence is a state. It describes how you feel, and it can come and go within one evening.

Rizz is the skill as the other person perceives it. You cannot declare that you have it. Someone else has to notice. “Unspoken rizz” is the same thing without words: the look, the timing, the person who barely speaks and still leaves with a number. A look nobody follows up is closer to a nanoship.

Rizz may get you that number. The weeks of messages that follow are the talking stage, where replying on time probably matters more than charm.

What to do about it

We found no study of how to get rizz, so none of this comes with a citation. It is our read, and it does not need a single line.

1. Ask one real question, then a second one about the answer. The follow-up does more work than the question. Our first date questions are a reasonable place to start.
2. Say what you actually noticed. “You sound like you’d win any argument about pizza” lands better than “you’re cute.” Only one of them was about this person.
3. Make yes and no equally easy. “Want to get a drink after this? Fine if not.” Being easy to turn down is a green flag in its own right.

The rest is out of your hands. The same question or joke can land with one person and fall flat with the next. That is the nature of the thing, not a fault in your delivery.

What the research says

There is no research on rizz itself. The sources for this page are dictionaries: Oxford Languages, Dictionary.com and the Wiktionary entry that cites Zimmer. The one exception is a review of charisma research (Antonakis et al., 2016), used here for a single point: the older word has no settled definition either. Studies of flirting and attraction do exist, but they do not measure rizz, and we would rather not dress them up as if they did. Anyone promising a proven method for how to get rizz is selling an opinion.