Merriam-Webster names “slop” its word of the year

The impact of artificial intelligence on social media channels has not gone unnoticed by the most important American dictionaries. Amid the onslaught of content that has swept the Internet over the past 12 months, Merriam-Webster announced Sunday that its word for 2025 is “dirty.”

The dictionary defines the term as “low-quality digital content usually mass-produced by artificial intelligence.”

“He loves The mud, Sludgeand clay, slope It has the wet sound of something you don’t want to touch. “Regression seeps into everything,” the dictionary writes, adding that in an age of anxiety about artificial intelligence, the term has become designed to convey a “less fearful, more cynical tone” of the technology.

“It’s a clarification,” Greg Barlow, president of Merriam-Webster, told The Associated Press. “It’s a piece of transformative technology, artificial intelligence, and it’s something that people have found fascinating and annoying and a little bit silly.”

The word “slop” has certainly been everywhere this year, as journalists and commentators sought to describe the ways in which platforms like OpenAI’s Sora and Google Gemini’s Veo are transforming the internet. Thanks to this new generation of media generators, there are now AI-generated books, podcasts, pop songs, TV commercials, and even entire movies. One study conducted in May claimed that nearly 75 percent of all new web content from the previous month involved some type of artificial intelligence.

These new tools have even led to what has been called the “slow economy,” where large amounts of AI-generated content can be exploited for advertising dollars. Critics worry that this trend is further polarizing digital communities, dividing them into those who can afford high-quality, paywalled content, and those who can only afford a sordid digital diet, which — as you might imagine — can be very light on informational value.

But the word “slop” has also been used to describe the impact of AI on a wide variety of areas unrelated to traditional media consumption, including cybersecurity reports, legal briefs, and college essays, among others. Its influence is broad, to say the least.

Relatedly, technical words were the big winners in the WOTY (Word of the Year) category this year. The Macquarie Dictionary beat out Merriam-Webster to make “AI slop” its annual term, while the Oxford Dictionary chose “Ragebait.” Collins Dictionary went by “encoding atmospheres.”