'HOPEWEAVING'

I couldn't find a word for my 2026, so I've created one.

As 2026 opened, a familiar ritual rolled out through culture. Dictionaries, commentators, and professional mood-readers declared their Words of the Year. Single terms offered up as neat explanations for why the world feels... like this.

For 2025, the official lists followed a familiar pattern: trying to capture our collective unease with forensic precision, but with very little ambition. The words are all sharp, clever, and faintly despairing.

Oxford University Press chose rage bait - content engineered to provoke outrage. Merriam-Webster went with "slop"- the AI-generated drivel that oozes across our screens. Cambridge Dictionary picked parasocial - our one-sided relationships with celebrities and chatbots who’ll never know our names. My personal favourite (as someone with two pre-teen nieces) was Dictionary.com’s choice of 67 as their word - a Gen Alpha meme that means absolutely nothing (which is perhaps the point). Although I’m not sure it works without the wiggle.

These words are all very clever and flick right on the collective cultural nose.

But none of them offer even a crumb of inspiration in these terrifying times.

They are simply all interesting linguistic ways to say everything sucks.

Overall, English is developing a vast new lexicon of anxiety. From Enshittification to Wokelash and everything in between.

But what I desperately need for 2026 is a language for agency. New ways to talk about action, about hope, and about standing up when the world wants you down.

Language (and life) evolves, and so much of the vocabulary of sustainability, activism, and even justice feels a little worn and frayed. I struggled to find words to capture the feeling I have about what’s needed now, in 2026. Rather than what worked 5 years ago.

Then I remembered my mum. Unlike me, she has patience. And that patience is most obvious when she sews and embroiders. Taking tiny, weak, insubstantial strands and over time (weeks, months) using skill and attention to combine them into something beautiful. Something that lasts.

Her craft suggested a word to me:

HOPEWEAVING

Hopeweaving is a skilled and deliberate act to make the world better. However thin the thread.

It’s the practice of stitching together credible solutions, everyday actions, emotional permission and human story into something strong enough to live inside. To wrap yourself in when the world feels cold.

Hopeweaving acknowledges the frayed and broken threads. The ones that seem too delicate to bear any weight at all. Actions so small that alone they’d snap. But you refuse to leave undone.

The future doesn’t arrive fully formed via policy or technology alone. It’s assembled slowly, collectively, through millions of acts that feel small only because we’ve failed to connect them. A researcher sharing data becomes a thread. An artist making climate solutions beautiful becomes another. A politician refusing to be bought. An engineer making solar cheaper. A storyteller giving us new myths to believe in.

A tired or scared person sharing someone else’s bold social media post about current horrors because they are too anxious to share their own. That donation. Picking up litter. Smiling at the person who looks worried if they’ll be accepted.

Every strand is load-bearing.

Because while they may be fragments. Woven together, they’re a movement.

Crucially, hopeweaving rejects the lazy binary between realism and hope. Realism says the science is brutal, the timelines unforgiving, and the politics unbearable.

Hopeweaving replies: yes. And people still fall in love, build institutions, shift norms, raise children and surprise history.

Why We Need It Now

The year has barely started, and already feels incredibly heavy. Perhaps by the time you read this, there will be a different outrage or horror than the ones on the day I wrote it.

The ‘official’ words of 2025 reflected our fatigue with all this. Rage bait, slop, parasocial, enshittification. These are the vocabulary of a culture that knows something’s deeply wrong but can’t quite picture what right looks like.

That’s the space hopeweaving fills.

A stubborn, careful, deliberate work of making a better future feel possible so that people can do the hard work of making it actual.

Because here’s what I’ve learned in thirty years of sustainability action: people don’t act on information. They act on identity, emotion and story.

You can show someone a thousand graphs proving the climate is collapsing. They can watch acts of terror unfold on their screens. But if we can’t picture ourselves in a liveable future, then the graphs are just noise.

Hopeweaving gives us the thread to stitch that future into being.

Start Your Weaving

So, hopeweaving is my word for 2026. I hope you use it, stitched into your own language of action.

Weave science with story, and justice with joy. Weave imagination into every action.

Weave until the fabric is strong enough to hold us all.

One thread at a time.