‘Brain rot’ named Oxford’s 2024 Word of the Year, beating ‘demure’ and ‘lore’
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Oxford University Press declares “brain rot” – specifically, the kind brought on by digital overload – as its 2024 Word of the Year.
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LONDON – Oxford University Press, publisher of the august Oxford English Dictionary, is going a bit fuzzy between the ears.
After digging through its enormous database, it has chosen “brain rot” – specifically, the kind brought on by digital overload – as its 2024 Word of the Year.
It has been quite a journey for brain rot, which triumphed over a shortlist of contenders including “lore”, “demure”, “romantasy”, “dynamic pricing” and “slop”.
According to Oxford, brain rot’s earliest known appearance was in 1854, in Walden, Henry David Thoreau’s classic account of moving alone to a cabin in the woods.
These days, it is often invoked by young people on social media to describe the “supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state”, particularly stemming from over-consumption of trivial online content.
That usage surged by about 230 per cent over the past year. Mr Casper Grathwohl, president of Oxford Languages, the company’s dictionary division, said the term’s rise reflects the breakneck speed of social media-driven language change.
“With brain rot,” he said, “it’s a phenomenon of young people skewering language trends on TikTok, almost exactly after they themselves have churned out that language.”
Oxford’s Word of the Year is based on usage evidence drawn from its continually updated corpus of some 26 billion words, which is drawn from news sources around the English-speaking world. The idea is to reflect the moods and conversations that have shaped 2024, backed by data.
The contest began 20 years ago. Over the years, it has anointed enduring new words such as “podcast”, “selfie” and “post-truth”, along with a few head-scratchers. “Youthquake”, from 2017, came in for particular abuse.
And the contest itself has affected the language. In 2023, after Oxford chose “rizz” – Gen Z or Gen Alpha slang for style, charm or attractiveness, possibly derived from “charisma” – a flood of news coverage caused usage to spike by more than 1,500 per cent.
Current usage remains twice as high as it was immediately before last fall’s announcement, according to Oxford’s data. NYTIMES
