Merriam-Webster names ‘slop’ the word of the year
AI’s impact on our social media feeds has not gone unnoticed by one of America’s top dictionaries. Amidst the onslaught of content that has swept the web over the past twelve months, Merriam-Webster announced Sunday that its word of the year for 2025 is “slop.”
The dictionary defines the term as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.”
“Like slime, sludge, and muck, slop has the wet sound of something you don’t want to touch. Slop oozes into everything,” the dictionary writes, adding that, in an age of AI anxiety, it is a term designed to communicate “a tone that’s less fearful, more mocking” of the technology.
“It’s such an illustrative word,” Merriam-Webster’s president, Greg Barlow, told The Associated Press. “It’s part of a transformative technology, AI, and it’s something that people have found fascinating, annoying, and a little bit ridiculous.”
The word “slop” has certainly been everywhere this year, as journalists and commentators have 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 breed of media generator, there are now AI-generated books, podcasts, pop songs, TV commercials—even entire movies. One study in May claimed that nearly 75 percent of all new web content from the previous month had involved some kind of AI.
These new tools have even led to what has been dubbed a “slop economy,” in which gluts of AI-generated content can be milked for advertising money. Critics worry that this trend is further polarizing digital communities, dividing them up into those who can afford paywalled, higher-quality content, and those who can only afford a digital diet of slop, which—as you might imagine—can be quite light on informational value.
But “slop” has also been used to describe AI’s impact on a large variety of fields that don’t have much to do with traditional media consumption, including cybersecurity reports, legal briefings, and the college essay, among other things. Its impact is broad, to say the least.
Relatedly, tech words have been big winners in the WOTY (word of the year) category this year. Macquarie Dictionary already beat out Merriam-Webster to make “AI slop” its annual term, while Oxford Dictionary chose “ragebait.” Collins Dictionary went with “vibe coding.”
