roman

Bringing back the dead with software: a singer's voice on a new track, an actor's face in an advert, a grandparent as a chatbot. Named in 2023 as a criticism, and by 2025 a product category with a subscription tier.

Fraud conducted through a fake romantic relationship, usually online, in which the beloved cannot meet, cannot video-call and urgently needs money — the romance scam — tracked by the FTC as its most expensive consumer fraud category by 2021. The record's entry for the oil-rig engineer who loves you.

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, launched by NASA on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy on 30 August 2026, built to study dark energy, dark matter and exoplanets. The internet's newest space telescope and, for a few days, its newest reason to post about the size of the universe. The record's entry for the launch and the wallpaper that will follow.

The discovery that men think about ancient Rome a great deal. A month of good jokes followed by four months of explanatory columns from historians.

A tile-laying game in which the player builds a landscape of villages, forests and rivers with no enemies and no clock, released into early access in March 2021 by four German students and winner of the German Computer Game Award in 2022. The record notes that it was the gentlest game on Steam's charts that spring, and that its name means roughly 'village romance'.

'How often do you think about the Roman Empire?' — the September 2023 question that revealed men think about it weekly, and 'my Roman Empire' as the phrase for anything you cannot stop thinking about. The record's entry for the empire as a personality test.

The instruction to treat your own ordinary day as the film — the coffee, the walk, the light through the window — romanticize your life, from a 2020 TikTok that went viral in lockdown and turned into a genre of slow, golden-hour videos of buttering toast. The record's entry for the main character's quieter cousin.