Allow me to present 'slop'
It’s the Word of the Year that Merriam-Webster has just announced
I’ve been holding this post for 10 days or so, waiting for the final major English dictionary site to announce its Word of the Year. Merriam-Webster has come through at last. Its word is slop, defined as follows: “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.” Timely, but depressing — as many timely things are these days.
I’m sure if you’re a publicist working for a dictionary company, you’re glad the editorial people seem to enjoy coming up with a “Word of the Year” for you to announce. After all, there’s not a lot of breaking news in Dictionaryland — although, in other news, Merriam-Webster has also just come out with a new print edition, the 12th, of its Collegiate Dictionary, and this launch may have preoccupied people there, causing the delay in deciding in favor of slop.
Although dictionaries use considerably different methodologies to choose their annual word, they tend to base their choice on online lookup activity (what’s new among lookups on their site? what’s spiking?). I wish they wouldn’t, because as you’ll see below, the rules they follow often force them to anoint unmemorable words that have little to do with the overall zeitgeist.
There is, though, one Word of the Year contest, fielded by the nonprofit American Dialect Society, whose methodology is to solicit nominations from the public and then vote on them at its annual meeting, which they will next do on January 9, 2026. The society is accepting nominations through January 8, and you don’t have to be a member or attend the meeting or even consider yourself a word expert to nominate words. To get in on the action, just fill out this form. A hint: Nominating wordshop would be an inspired choice. (Kidding!)
As I reported in my Boston Globe column, Dictionary.com got out ahead of the pack by announcing its Word of the Year in late October — though I think the site blew it. It anointed the “viral” youth-slang term six-seven, which I’ve seen defined six ways to Sunday online (“indicates swagger,” means meh, is code for sex, etc.). But the site styled it 67, and as you know, that is already called “sixty-seven.” News outlets reporting on the word’s upgraded status tended to render it 6-7 or six-seven, each of which makes a lot more sense.
Since then, Oxford University Press has chosen rage bait, which it defines as “Online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, typically posted in order to increase traffic to or engagement with a particular web page or social media account.”
Cambridge Dictionary, which is popular among learners of English, went with parasocial, defined as “involving or relating to a connection that someone feels between themselves and a famous person they do not know, a character in a book, film, TV series, etc., or an artificial intelligence.” Is that creepy or is it just me?
And Collins Dictionary, well-regarded in the U.K. but less well known here, chose vibe coding: “an emerging software development that turns natural language into computer code using AI, has been named Collins’ Word of the Year 2025. The term was popularised by Andrej Karpathy, former Director of AI at Tesla and founding engineer at OpenAI, to describe how AI enables creative output while he could ‘forget that the code even exists’.” If you find that definition confusing, check out the link above for a video cartoon, involving a computer user, a cat, and some fish, that ably demonstrates vibe coding.
I’ll accept slop and rage bait as plausible recaps of 2025 — particularly when the people who came up with them are in the words business and must remain professionally apolitical. But the rest of them? Bah humbug!
Come to think of it, why don’t I declare my own Word of the Year. Or maybe we can do it together. Which do you like: authoritarian, fascist, empathy, or compassion? According to me, any of those would be a Word of the Year to live up to its name.
Email me with your language questions, problems, etc., at barbaraswordshop@gmail.com, and I’ll respond as soon as I can. Correspondence may be edited. If you subscribe to The Boston Globe, look for my column, “May I Have a Word,” in the Ideas section every other Sunday.
I would vote for empathy, because it needs to be mentioned more to bring it to mind more often, not because it has been used enough.
Slop is a time-honored accurate word, with wonderful onomatopoeia. Even better that it describes one of the key weaknesses of AI systems.