Oxford's Word of the Year: 'Brain Rot'

'Are you spending hours scrolling mindlessly on Instagram reels and TikTok?' asks the BBC. 'If so, you might be suffering from brain rot, which has become the Oxford word of the year.'

It is a term that captures concerns about the impact of consuming excessive amounts of low-quality online content, especially on social media. The word's usage saw an increase of 230% in its frequency from 2023 to 2024. Psychologist and Oxford University Professor, Andrew Przybylski says the popularity of the word is a 'symptom of the time we're living in'. Brain rot beat five other shortlisted words including demure, Romantasy and dynamic pricing... [And 'slop'.]

The first recorded use of brain rot dates much before the creation of the internet — it was written down in 1854 by Henry David Thoreau in his book Walden. He criticises society's tendency to devalue complex ideas and how this is part of a general decline in mental and intellectual effort. It leads him to ask: 'While England endeavours to cure the potato rot, will not any endeavour to cure the brain-rot — which prevails so much more widely and fatally?' The word initially gained traction on social media among Gen Z and Gen Alpha communities, but it's now being used in the mainstream as a way to describe low-quality, low-value content found on social media.

Prof Przybylski says 'there's no evidence of brain rot actually being a thing. Instead it describes our dissatisfaction with the online world and it's a word that we can use to bundle our anxieties that we have around social media.'

The New York Times points out that Oxford's past 'word of the year' selections included 'podcast' and 'selfie'

[Casper Grathwohl, the president of Oxford Languages, the company's dictionary division] noted the finalists were heavy on old-fashioned words that young people had repurposed in semi-ironic ways — the linguistic equivalent, he said, of 'bell-bottoms coming back into fashion....'

'Slop' has undergone a similar update. There was a spike of more than 300 percent over the past year in references not to pig feed, but to '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,' according to Oxford. Like 'brain rot,' it 'represents the underbelly of today's linguistic churn,' Grathwohl said. 'There's a sense that we are drowning in mediocre experiences as digital lives get clogged.'

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