“Slop” was named Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year 2025.
The word’s meaning evolved from muddy waste in the 1700s to a modern label for digital clutter.
The selection reflects growing public awareness and frustration with content overload online.
The word “slop” has been crowned as the Merriam-Webster Word of the Year 2025. The word showcases the large amount of low-quality content circulating online, making everyone feel overwhelmed. There has been a sharp rise in the use of artificial intelligence in every field, including content creation, creating digital clutter; thus, slop became a word widely used by the public. “Slop” basically means repetitive, worthless material circulating online that is generated in bulk using AI tools. The choice shows that internet users are aware of the content being forced upon them, as the word describes an ever-exploding flood of content.
The word made it to the top partly because of its frequency and partly because it reflects the shared experience of the internet in 2025, as per Merriam-Webster. People channelise their frustration through this word to describe content that lacks originality and depth, as AI has become more accessible with many options around, such as Sora by OpenAI. The dictionary also added that the word took its position in 2025 as it highlights its own cultural relevance.
The linguistic history of the Word of the Year has its own essence, changing and evolving with time and social shifts. Slop was referred to as “soft mud” or “filthy water” in the 1700s, relating it to something messy, unpleasant, and difficult to handle. The word evolved by the 19th century to include meanings such as things of little value and food waste, and even extended to leftovers, particularly scraps fed to animals. The term was then used more figuratively to describe something disposable or inferior. The word took on a new dimension in the digital era by denoting mass-produced online content of little value. The meaning remained largely the same, though its sense was polished and repurposed with time and changing social behaviour.
The dictionary has its own way of determining the annual selection. It tracks words that have seen an unusual surge in searches, relying heavily on data from its website. The word is then evaluated by editors by considering whether it appropriately reflects the cultural, political, or technological conversation of the year. Slop gained popularity through both statistics and symbolism, given the year’s persistent attention on AI-generated content and concerns around quality.
However, slop was not the only word that caught attention; there were several others that stood out, though slop remained at the top. Terms such as gerrymander reflected online political debates, while the slang touch grass added a humorous tone, meaning to reconnect with the real world by logging off. Words like performative and tariff also gained traction in 2025, highlighting discussions around social behaviour and global economics. These trends bring together politics, digital culture, and global uncertainty, showing how people blend these aspects while shaping the world.
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Slop highlights a modern internet trend where users struggle to differentiate between meaningful information and digital noise. It reflects a collective fatigue caused by content overload, as people question reliability and whether a particular piece of content deserves their attention. Here, artificial intelligence has played a role as a cultural accelerant that increases the volume of content but often lacks authenticity and trustworthiness.
The dictionary has consistently chosen words over the years that mirror societal concerns of their respective times. The 2024 Word of the Year was polarization, 2023 saw the rise of authenticity, 2022 gave way to gaslighting, 2021 to vaccine amid the coronavirus crisis, and 2020 to the obvious choice, pandemic, marking the beginning of the global outbreak. These words define public discourse, as they are born of the internet era and fueled by changing technology rather than a single global event. With this, the Word of the Year stands as a shared sentiment rather than a prescribed solution or policy response.
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