The word of the year is “brain rot”, reminding us that we are not living well

While the Collins Dictionary selected “brat”, and the Cambridge Dictionary and Merriam-Webster went with “manifest” and “authentic” respectively, Oxford University Press, publisher of the Oxford English Dictionary, picked the term “brain rot”, referring to the deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state caused by overconsumption of low-quality online content.

According to Casper Grathwohl, president of Oxford Languages, the Words of the Year from the past two decades show how language is shaped by internet culture, which has become the epicenter of linguistic evolution where language develops collectively in a faster and more pervasive way, leaving a profound impact on global communication.

Oxford University Press traces the earliest recorded use of “brain rot” back to 1854, when Henry David Thoreau used it in his book Walden to describe a collective intellectual disengagement, which he attributed to the progressive devaluation of complex ideas. Between 2023 and 2024, the term’s popularity surged by 230%, becoming a staple of Gen Z and Alpha slang that humorously describes the side effects of hyperconnected living – like trying to swipe the pages of a book – while also expressing the anxieties and dissatisfaction tied to an increasingly inseparable bond with the digital world.

Opening image: photo by Andrew Guan on Unsplash