Merriam-Webster: 'Slop' wins 2025's word of year

by · UPI

Dec. 15 (UPI) -- Editors at Merriam-Webster picked "slop" as 2025's word and say it helped define the year overall.

On Sunday, America's oldest dictionary publisher said amid talk about the growing threats related to artificial intelligence that the word slop set "a tone that's less fearful" and was "more mocking."

"The flood of slop in 2025 included absurd videos, off-kilter advertising images, cheesy propaganda, fake news that looks pretty real and junky AI-written books," according to a release.

The Massachusetts-based Merriam-Webster said it defined slop as digital content of "low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence."

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Originally, the word meant "soft mud" in the 1700s.

By the 1800s, it came to refer to "food waste" -- as in "pig slop"-- and later took on the broader meaning of "rubbish" or "something of little or no value."

Officials at Merriam-Webster stated how with "all that stuff dumped on our screens, captured in just four letters: the English language came through again" with a word to describe the outgoing year and its new usage.

It added that "slop" sends "a little message to AI: when it comes to replacing human creativity, sometimes you don't seem too super intelligent."

Over half a dozen English dictionaries anoint an annual word or phrase meant to encapsulate the zeitgeist of the prior year.

In 2015, Merriam-Webster kept up with the times and added more than 1,700 new words into its dictionary, including such words as "emoji" and "colossal squid" in addition to "WTF" for when a "NSFW" "memes" is seen.

"The top word of the year is one that has had multiple spikes in lookups, in addition to being more frequently looked up overall," Merriam-Webster said last year in December as it unveiled "polarization" its word of the year for 2024.

It joined a list of 2024 winners from other dictionaries that included "brat" and "manifest," in addition to "demure," "brain rot" and "enshittification."

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