Merriam-Webster Picks “Slop” as Its 2025 Word of the Year

Merriam-Webster on Monday named “slop” its word of the year for 2025, defining it as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence,” CBS News and NBC News reported.

The company said the word captures the “absurd videos, weird advertising images, cheesy propaganda, fake news that looks real, junky AI-written digital books” that filled social media feeds this year. “All that stuff dumped on our screens, captured in just four letters: the English language came through again,” it said, per NBC. Greg Barlow, the dictionary’s president, told The Associated Press, as CBS relayed: “It’s such an illustrative word. It’s part of a transformative technology, AI, and it’s something that people have found fascinating, annoying and a little bit ridiculous.”

“Slop” dates to the 1700s, when it meant soft mud, and later broadened to mean something of little value, CBS reported. CBS noted that generative video tools such as Sora can quickly make realistic clips from text prompts, and that a flood of such images, including clips of celebrities and deceased public figures, has raised concerns about misinformation, deepfakes and copyright infringement.

Barlow said the spike in searches reflects growing awareness of fake or shoddy content and a desire for its opposite. “They want things that are real, they want things that are genuine,” he said. “It’s almost a defiant word when it comes to AI. When it comes to replacing human creativity, sometimes AI actually doesn’t seem so intelligent.”

NBC noted the pick is based largely on spikes in search data on merriam-webster.com; the 2020 and 2021 choices were “pandemic” and “vaccine,” and last year’s was “polarization.” Other words that stood out to the editors this year were “gerrymander,” “touch grass,” “performative,” “tariff,” “six seven” and “conclave.” NBC added that the long alternate name of Webster Lake in Massachusetts rose in searches because of its appearance in the online world Roblox.

Oxford University Press, publisher of the Oxford English Dictionary, chose a different word and a different method, NBC reported. Its pick, “rage bait,” defined as “online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage,” came from a three-day public vote of more than 30,000 votes along with data analysis. Oxford said 2025’s news cycle was dominated by social unrest, debates over regulating online content and concerns about digital wellbeing. Its 2024 word was “brain rot.”

The editors’ choice and Oxford’s differ in method as well as word.