Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year for 2025 is a short, blunt one — and it’s aimed straight at your feed: “slop.”
Merriam-Webster defines “slop” as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.” In other words, the obviously fake stuff that spreads fast.
Merriam-Webster’s editors said the word captured a growing public frustration, but also a deeper longing. Speaking to The Associated Press, Merriam-Webster President Greg Barlow framed “slop” as a kind of warning label — one that shows that people “want things that are real, they want things that are genuine. 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.”
Across other major dictionaries and cultural institutions, 2025’s “words of the year” landed on a consistent theme that the modern internet can be exhausting.
Merriam-Webster: ‘slop’
The company has long emphasized search behavior — what readers look up and why — alongside cultural relevance.
This year, “slop” surged in the broader context of AI-generated everything: deepfakes, auto-written books and bizarre synthetic videos flooding platforms.
Merriam-Webster also highlighted other high-interest terms from the year — including “performative,” “67,” “touch grass” and “conclave” — but “slop” was the one that best “told the story” of 2025.
Oxford: ‘rage bait’
Oxford University Press went with a phrase that describes a familiar emotional trap: “rage bait.”
Oxford defines it as online content deliberately designed to provoke anger or outrage — often to drive clicks, shares, comments and algorithmic reach.
In announcing the choice, Oxford pointed to the way attention has become a commodity — and how outrage is one of the easiest ways to harvest it at scale.
Oxford’s process also included a public vote (with tens of thousands participating), then a final decision that weighed language data and expert review.
Cambridge: ‘parasocial’
Cambridge Dictionary’s 2025 pick zoomed in on relationships — specifically the one-sided kind: “parasocial.”
Cambridge defines “parasocial” as involving a connection someone feels with a famous person they don’t know — or even a fictional character or an AI bot.
Cambridge said interest in these one-way bonds was a defining part of the year’s language landscape, fueled by influencer culture and the growing presence of chatbot-style companions.
If “slop” is about what’s filling the internet, “parasocial” is about what the internet is filling in people — the ache for connection, attention and belonging, especially when real-life community feels fragmented or harder to maintain.
Collins: ‘vibe coding’
Collins Dictionary picked a term that sits at the intersection of AI and work: “vibe coding.”
Collins described it as an emerging style of software development where people use natural-language prompts to get AI systems to generate code.
The phrase was popularized by computer scientist Andrej Karpathy, and Collins positioned it as a snapshot of how quickly AI is changing what it even means to know how to code.
Dictionary.com: ‘67′
Dictionary.com’s Word of the Year was the one that made many adults blink: “67” or “six-seven.”
The site described it as viral slang with deliberately slippery meaning — an inside-joke style of expression that exploded among kids and teens in 2025.
The word doesn’t have a stable definition, but shows how a huge amount of modern language is now born inside algorithmic ecosystems — and sometimes the shared confusion is the definition.
Macquarie: ‘AI slop’
In Australia, Macquarie Dictionary landed on a cousin term: “AI slop.”
Macquarie defined it as low-quality content generated by AI — often error-filled and not even requested — and reported that it won both the committee’s choice and the public vote.
Beyond dictionaries: Glassdoor’s ‘fatigue’
Not every “word of the year” comes from a dictionary. Job site Glassdoor chose “fatigue” — and backed it with what it said were measurable changes in how often workers used the word in its community discussions.
Glassdoor said mentions of “fatigue” spiked this year as people tried to do normal life and normal work inside an abnormal mix of headline stress, economic pressure, politics-at-work tension and nonstop technological change.