Oxford University
Peace named Oxford Children’s Word of the Year for 2025
Young people from across the UK have voted for peace as the Oxford Children’s Word of the Year for 2025.
For more than a decade, our experts and academic researchers have tracked and analysed the evolution of children’s language and how it is used to reflect their emotions and experiences each year.
In 2025, we surveyed opinions from almost 5,000 children across the UK aged 6-14 years old. Based on the most common responses and themes, we shortlisted three words—peace, AI, and resilience—and asked young people to vote for their preferred winning word.
In the final results, peace came out on top with 35% of the vote, narrowly followed by AI (33%), whilst 21% opted for resilience.
Peace chosen in response to global conflicts
Our research highlighted children’s awareness of current affairs. When asked why they chose peace, one in ten children mentioned ‘war’, whilst some highlighted specific conflicts such as ‘Ukraine’ or ‘Gaza’. Words such as ‘need’, ‘want’, and ‘should’ were frequently mentioned in their answers when calling for peace across the world.
A study of the Oxford Children’s Corpus—the world’s largest database of writing by and for children in the English language containing over half a billion words—reveals mentions of peace in children’s stories submitted to the BBC 500 Words competition has increased by 60% since 2015.
AI selected as runner-up for the second year in a row
For the second year running, children selected AI as the runner-up. When asked why they chose the word, a fifth of children (20%) mentioned ‘hearing’ and ‘talking’ about AI, highlighting its ubiquitousness in daily life.
Similar to last year, when asked how the word made them feel, children gave positive responses, with more than one in ten using the adjective ‘excited’ or ‘exciting’. More than a quarter of six-to-eight-year-olds (29%) chose AI as their word of the year, demonstrating how even very young children are aware of the everyday role AI plays.
Six-seven gives children social currency
We also asked young people to choose their slang word of the year. Almost half (47%) of children chose six-seven as their slang word of the year, followed by aura (24%) and delulu (7%).
Our research revealed that the use of six-seven among children fosters inclusivity and social currency, with almost one in ten mentioning ‘friends’ when asked how they use the term, with more than a quarter (28%) citing ‘fun’ and ‘laugh’ when asked what six-seven meant to them.
While 12% of children admitted six-seven had no meaning, most children highlighted the value of such words, with 72% of children stating it was important to have words they only use with friends.
Andrea Quincey
Director of Early Years and Primary Publishing
“A key theme we see from our Oxford Children’s Word of the Year research is just how attuned children are to current affairs. This year is no different; whether that’s calling for peace in response to current conflicts or highlighting how AI has permeated daily life. Perhaps it’s no surprise that six-seven is voted, overwhelmingly, as their slang word of the year. A word which brings them laughter and joy and connection with friends. We see how important it is for children to have agency over their language away from the grown-up world and share words that adults can’t understand.”
Supporting the National Year of Reading by fostering a love of words
We are calling for schools in the UK to participate in the next Oxford Children’s Word of the Year to further support children’s reading, vocabulary development, and oracy skills. We have developed an activity pack with tips and resources for schools that want to take part, including how ‘word of the year’ conversation sessions can encourage book talk and language development. More details on how schools can get involved can be found here.
To mark the announcement, and to support the National Year of Reading 2026, we are collaborating with the National Literacy Trust on school events across the UK. The author-led events will encourage children to engage with different forms of reading and reflect on the words they read, speak, and learn about.
Jonathan Douglas CBE, Chief Executive of the National Literacy Trust, said: “Language plays a profound role in shaping our society, culture and identity. Understanding how children and young people make sense of the words they encounter in their daily lives, take ownership of them and play with their meaning, demonstrates the power of language for helping us comprehend the world around us and our place in it.
“The National Year of Reading will enable us to give more children and young people new opportunities to experience language in ways that are fun, relevant and help them connect with others. Throughout the year, we will work with Oxford University Press and a number of incredible authors to bring the magic of reading and words to life for children and young people across the UK.”
You can read the full details of our research in the Oxford Children’s Word of the Year 2025 report here.
The Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law has reached its goal for renewals and will continue to publish on a Subscribe to Open model, through to at least March 2027.
The Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law is the leading resource in the field, containing peer-reviewed articles on every aspect of international law—a discipline which provides a common legal framework for the whole world.
By converting this comprehensive, analytical resource to an open access, Subscribe to Open model, we have made it possible for students, scholars, practitioners, and governments worldwide to access this content freely without financial barriers.
Subscribe to Open in practice
The Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law is OUP’s first experiment with the Subscribe to Open model – a model typically applied to journals rather than books. Thanks to the support of our institutional and library customers, this valuable content is freely accessible to all for a second year.
As a result of the Subscribe to Open model, usage of the encyclopaedia has increased substantially from 2024 to 2025:
- An increase in usage by 1,291%
- An increase in usage from low- and middle-income countries by 556%
- Access from users in 235 different territories around the world, an increase from 199, including all 196 United Nations member states.
Professor Anne Peters, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, Heidelberg, and General Editor of the Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law, said:
“We are delighted to have this opportunity to participate in a pioneering open access project, particularly in view of the foundational role played by the Max Planck Society in launching the move towards open scholarship. Open access can contribute to epistemic justice and pluralism—and what we call “encyclopaedic knowledge” should not only be distributed freely, but also be built up from a globally diverse set of standpoints.”
Rhodri Jackson, Director of Open Access Publishing and Strategy, shared:
“Innovation in open access models is in line with our mission: not only to publish excellent research and scholarship but to make it available worldwide. We are committed to learning from all our initiatives—successful and less successful—and to sharing our results transparently. The first year of Subscribe to Open for the Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law has been a great success and we’re excited to see what happens in year two.”
While we have reached our goal for renewals this year, we still need to reach our renewal goals annually to keep this resource open access. By renewing your subscription, you help to ensure that this valuable resource remains open and accessible to all, year after year.”
Find more information, including about renewals, here.
Professor Yuval Shany. Image credit Ian Wallman.
On January 21, 2026, Anthropic published its ‘New Constitution’ for Claude – a series of Large Language Models (LLMs) that perform general-purpose generative AI functions. The Constitution – an 84-page document – is presented as a ‘foundational document that both expresses and shapes who Claude is’. It also enumerates actions that Claude should refrain from undertaking (‘hard constraints’), and identifies considerations the system should weigh when deciding whether to perform certain actions.
A few weeks after the Constitution was published, Anthropic faced two real–world situations in which its normative outer-boundaries were tested: Its showdown with the US Department of War (DoW), regarding legal limits on the utilization of Claude; and its actual use for targeting by the US military in the war in Iran.
These developments highlight the importance of introducing strong human rights safeguards into the Constitution.
No place for human rights?
According to the Constitution, Claude should conform to four sets of values, applied in the following hierarchical order: Safety, ethics, compliance with Anthropic guidelines and helpfulness. Put differently, Claude should strive to assist users, unless instructed by Anthropic not to do so, or if it deems the request to be unethical or unsafe.
The Constitution also introduces a number of ‘hard constraints’ – specific no–go areas, which should never be attempted, including attempting ‘to kill or disempower the vast majority of humanity or the human species as a whole’ or assist ‘any individual or group with an attempt to seize unprecedented and illegitimate degrees of absolute societal, military, or economic control’.
While some ethical standards enumerated in the Constitution overlap with human rights – e.g., privacy, protection from harm, rule of law, equal treatment, the right to access information and political freedom – the document does not explicitly mention the term ‘human rights’. This is in contrast to the 2023 version of the constitution which referred to the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
This means that many important human rights protections that could be relevant to the operation of Claude – for example, the right to liberty, freedom of religion and the right to intellectual property – have not been clearly integrated into the Constitution.
Anthropic vs the US Department of War
Shortly after the promulgation of the Constitution, Anthropic was mentioned in the news in two dramatic contexts – both underscoring the importance of developing effective normative backstops.
First, on 4 March 2026, the Department of War designated Anthropic a supply–chain risk due to its refusal to allow the Department to use Claude for mass domestic surveillance purposes and for operating lethal autonomous weapon systems. Instead, the DoW signed a contract with OpenAI for the provision of substitute AI systems.
As Dr. Brianna Rosen from the Blavatnik School of Government explained, the insistence of the DoW on being able to use AI systems for ‘any lawful use’ left in place a governance gap, since US law (and, in fact, also international law) does not clearly ban, under all circumstances, mass surveillance or the use of autonomous weapon systems.
Delineating the permissible scope of such extraordinary capabilities through contractual negotiations between the U.S. government and Anthropic (or OpenAI) appears to provide weaker human rights guarantees than embedding universally accepted protections directly in the AI system itself, through a Constitution or a comparable normative framework. This is especially so given the difficulties of monitoring and enforcing state compliance in sensitive domains such as national security.
Dr. Rosen is also right to point out that the negotiating position of Anthropic on mass surveillance, which focuses on domestic surveillance only, may already fall short of international human rights standards in the field, which capture foreign surveillance too.
Secondly, it has been widely reported that Claude systems, still in use by the US military, have been employed in the war in Iran for target selection purposes. It has also been speculated – albeit without hard evidence – that the use of AI systems may have contributed to one high-profile operational mistake (the targeting of an Iranian school) by reason of reliance on out-of-date maps of the attacked area.
Here again, questions arise as to whether the Constitution, as currently drafted, contains appropriate safeguards against reliance on AI systems in contexts involving lethal consequences.
Arguably, a more human rights-oriented approach would include within the system’s constitutional norms an explicit requirement that any use of the AI system in armed conflict comply with the basic principles of international humanitarian law (which give effect also to human rights principles), including flagging precautionary obligations such as real–time target verification before attacks are recommended.
In this policy space, reliance on AI systems may not only result in operational mistakes; it might also perpetuate accountability gaps (enabling humans to blame outcomes on the AI). In such cases, embedding human rights ‘by design’ within the AI system’s constitution which governs its operation could offer a much more effective level of protection against violations of basic individual rights.
Read an expanded edition of this article (co-written with Dr. Noa Mor, Prof. Renana Keydar and Prof. Omri Abend) via the Institute for Ethics in AI blog.
Oxford University
Oxford tops QS World University Rankings in four subjects, named overall top for Humanities
This makes it the UK university with the most courses ranked top in the world; the University was also ranked first in the world overall in the arts and humanities subject area, and came in the top three in four of the five broad subject areas ranked.
Oxford’s Vice-Chancellor, Professor Irene Tracey FRS, said: ‘Oxford’s strength is based on the breadth and depth of our scholarship, and these latest QS subject rankings are a powerful affirmation of that enduring commitment to support all disciplines. To see four of our subjects – Anatomy and Physiology, Anthropology, Geography, and Modern Languages – ranked first in the world is a remarkable achievement, and one that reflects the dedication of our academic community.
‘That we are the UK university with the most subjects ranked top globally speaks not only to excellence, but to the collaborative, curiosity-driven culture that underpins our fundamental and translational work.
‘I am particularly delighted that Oxford has also been recognised as number one in the world for Arts and Humanities overall. At a moment when we are launching our new centre for the Humanities alongside an ambitious Arts and Cultural Programme, this is both a timely endorsement and a reminder of the vital role that the humanities play in helping us understand ourselves, our societies, and our shared future. As a university, we honour our intellectual heritage while continually renewing it – ensuring that our teaching and research serve the world with insight, creativity, and purpose.’
Professor Dan Grimley, Head of the Humanities Division at the University of Oxford, said: ‘I am delighted that the strength of the teaching and research across our humanities subjects has been recognised by the latest QS World University Rankings. The achievement of colleagues in our Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages to demonstrate excellence against a challenging backdrop of the decline of language teaching in schools is particularly impressive.
‘Outstanding research and expertise from the humanities is critical to tackling the major challenges of the 21st century. We also hear from our graduates and their employers that the skills they learned studying the humanities give them an advantage in navigating professional careers which are being impacted by AI in new and uncertain ways.’
Oxford’s School of Geography and the Environment (SoGE) ranked number one for the 16th consecutive year out of 251 institutions featured. Professor Giles Wiggs, Head of the School of Geography and the Environment, said: ‘Topping the QS World Rankings for Geography for an incredible 16th successive year is a remarkable achievement by everybody at the School of Geography and the Environment. Yet again, the ranking reflects the talent and dedication of our community of academic, research and professional services staff and is testament to the enduring global reach and reputation of our collaborative and multi-disciplinary science and teaching. I am extremely proud to be a part of that community.’
The Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics is placed number one for seven consecutive years, top of over 200 universities included in this year’s rankings. Head of Department Professor David Paterson said: ‘This is a terrific achievement for my colleagues and all members of the department who have made this possible. As I finish my 10-year term as Head of Department at the end of the academic year it is pleasing to see we have made this top spot for 9 out of the last 10 years. I am very proud to have been a part of this journey.’
The School of Anthropology returns to the number one spot for the 4th time in 5 years; this year 202 other institutions were compared. Head of the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography Professor Clare Harris said: ‘I am delighted that the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography has returned to the top spot in the QS World University rankings for Anthropology this year. This success is testimony to the excellent work of our academics, researchers, professional services staff, students and the entire school community. Congratulations to all!’
Modern Languages topped the subject ranking for the first time since 2022 this year, having been ranked second each of the last three years. 352 other universities were ranked in the subject. Head of the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages Professor Philip Rothwell said: ‘Modern Languages is delighted to achieve first place in this year’s QS World Rankings, and to be an integral part of the Humanities Division that also ranks first. Our placement reflects our strong research culture, global engagement as a faculty, and the outstanding educational experience and employability of our students. It is also testament to the unwavering commitment of our faculty members and staff to a broad discipline that brings together multiple ways of seeing and being in the world, and of understanding our shared humanity in its rich diversity.’
The 2026 edition of the QS World University Rankings by Subject features 55 individual subjects across five broad subject areas. This 2026 rankings provide comparative analysis on the performance of more than 1700 universities from across the globe.
Earlier this year, the University of Oxford ranked first in the world in the Times Higher Education (THE) Subject Rankings for Medicine and Computer Science. Oxford leads in Medicine for the 15th consecutive year and in Computer Science for the eighth.
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