The 10 most annoying corporate jargon phrases for PRs to avoid

Expressions such as “reach out” and “growthhacking” have been voted as the worst corporate jargon, according to a survey of thousands of reporters from the UK and US.

e tend to reach for words that are vague and over-used rather than language that is specific and memorable,” Hamish Thompson, managing director at Houston PR (Getty)

The English language has over a million words – but that doesn’t stop some people from choosing the kind of corporate jargon that makes people cringe.

Expressions such as “reach out” and “growthhacking” have been voted as the worst corporate jargon, according to a survey of thousands of reporters from the UK and US.

Hamish Thompson, managing director at Houston PR, admitted that his own industry fares particularly badly for using buzz-words.

He put together the survey as a cautionary list for colleagues.

“The extraordinary thing is that we tend to reach for words that are vague and over-used rather than language that is specific and memorable,” Thompson told the Independent.

“The strange thing is that it mostly starts with a genuine impulse to say something differently,” he said.

Here are the 10 most annoying piece of jargon (rated from most irritating to slightly less so):

1. Reach out

2. Growthhacking

3. Onboarding

4. Curate

5. Circle back

6. Synergy

7. Empower

8. Solutions

9. De-layer

10. Ecosystem

Terms such as “bandwith”, “robust” and “evangelist” also came short of being in the top 10.

Several journalists also mentioned “disruptive”, “leverage”, “downsize”, “monetise” and “unicorn”.

“A few years ago, I remember seeing a business describe itself as 'a global leader in the adhesive labelling solutions sector’ and I thought, what you mean is ‘we sell stickers’, which I think is better,” he said.

“This is English. There are bound to be 579 other, fresher ways of saying it,” he added.