In October, we asked ‘Will this year’s word of the year be another slice of Gen-Alpha slang?’ In the article, Digital Journal pondered over potential words that might be selected.
What represents the ‘word of the year’ is, of course, subjective and it depends on the august body that awards it. The first such winner to emerge in 2024 comes from the Oxford English Dictionary (established 1884).
This year the publishers of the Oxford Dictionary have named “brain rot” the 2024 Word of the Year. This was the 20th year of lexicographers putting forward and helping to select words that captured the zeitgeist.
For 2024 the selection was made following a public vote in which more than 37,000 people took part. This was chosen from a shortlist of six words intended to reflect the moods and conversations that have helped shape the past year.
The other words on the short-list were:
• Demure (adj.): Of a person: reserved or restrained in appearance or behaviour. Of clothing: not showy, ostentatious, or overly revealing
• Dynamic pricing (n.): The practice of varying the price for a product or service to reflect changing market conditions; in particular, the charging of a higher price at a time of greater demand
• Lore (n.): A body of (supposed) facts, background information, and anecdotes relating to someone or something, regarded as knowledge required for full understanding or informed discussion of the subject in question
• Romantasy (n.): A genre of fiction combining elements of romantic fiction and fantasy, typically featuring themes of magic, the supernatural, or adventure alongside a central romantic storyline
• Slop (n.): Art, writing, or other content generated using artificial intelligence, shared and distributed online in an indiscriminate or intrusive way, and characterized as being of low quality, inauthentic, or inaccurate
How many of these words will remain on our lips by the time we reach the end of 2025?
“Brain rot” is a popular term used among Gen Z and Gen Alpha (despite the first usage being traced back to 1854) to describe both the cause and effect of “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging.”
In terms of everyday language, “brain rot” is intended to capture concerns about the impact of consuming excessive amounts of low-quality online content, especially on social media. The term increased in usage frequency by 230 percent between 2023 and 2024.
Hence, the most prominent “brain rot” symptom is the adoption of seemingly nonsensical language used in this type of unchallenging content, which may leave those not in the loop puzzled and confused.
How exposed are we to “brain rot”? According to The Guardian, the typical UK adult now spending at least four hours a day online (with gen Z men spending five and a half hours a day online, and gen Z women six and a half).
In 2023, the word of the year was “manifest” (as we reported on Digital Journal). Here, the traditional definition of manifest included the adjective “easily noticed or obvious” and the noun “to show something clearly through signs or actions”.
The post-2023 definition now includes “to manifest” in the sense of “to imagine achieving something you want, in the belief doing so will make it more likely to happen”.
