It’s not just you. Oxford University Press, publisher of the august Oxford English Dictionary, is also 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’s 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.
“While England endeavors to cure the potato-rot,” Thoreau lamented, “will not any endeavor to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally?”
The answer, apparently, is no. These days, according to Oxford, it’s often invoked by young people on social media to describe the “supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state,” particularly stemming from overconsumption of trivial online content.
That usage surged by about 230% over the past year. 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, according to the announcement, is to reflect “the moods and conversations that have shaped 2024,” backed by data.
As in the past few years, Oxford invited the public to vote on the shortlist. The winner was chosen by the publisher’s team of experts, based on the vote (roughly 37,000 people weighed in) and further analysis. “Choosing the Word of the Year,” Grathwohl acknowledged, “is a bit of a dark art.”
The contest began 20 years ago, with the selection of “chav” (British slang for working class). 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. Last year, 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%. Current usage remains twice as high as it was immediately before last fall’s announcement, according to Oxford’s data.
“It was a huge hit,” Grathwohl said. “It’s got swagger, real energy, and was just the shot in the arm people needed at that time — even if for the young people who drove its use, it was already passé.”
This year’s list is short on flashy neologisms or blended words like “broflake” or “lumbersexual.” This year’s lone portmanteau, “romantasy,” refers to “a genre of fiction that combines elements of romance and fantasy.”
Instead, Grathwohl 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.”
Take “demure.” The earliest recorded usage, according to Oxford, was in 1377, in a reference to the sea being calm. By the late 1400s, it commonly appears as a description of people who are serious, reserved or grave in demeanor.
Usage surged in August, after influencer Jools Lebron posted a TikTok video describing her makeup and dress as “very demure, very mindful,” sparking a deluge of posts across various platforms reusing the phrase.
The “demure” moment, Grathwohl noted, came shortly after singer Charli XCX sent “brat” surging. “It’s the other side of the coin,” he said.
“Lore,” which dates back almost 1,000 years, is another old-timey word that has been refashioned by young social media users, to refer to facts or beliefs surrounding a celebrity or a fictional character, or even one’s own personal history.
“Slop” has undergone a similar update. There was a spike of more than 300% 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.”
Oxford, it must be noted, is not the only language kingmaker. In recent weeks, there have also been Word of the Year announcements from Cambridge University Press (“manifest”) and Dictionary.com (justice for “demure”!).
Which raises an unsettling question: Could all these rival words — and the flood of news articles about them — contribute to brain rot?
“I don’t want to overblow the Word of the Year,” Grathwohl said. “It’s something fun and engaging.”
“The most successful ones,” he added, “are the ones that are slightly counterintuitive and make people think.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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