Oxford names "Brain Rot" Word of the Year.
Capping off a year that proved, without a shadow of a doubt, that non-A.V. Club readers are spending too much time ingesting the worst shit imaginable online, the Oxford University Press has named “brain rot” Word of the Year.
Maybe we should be thankful that “Hawk Tuah” didn’t make the shortlist.
Yes, we all have brain rot or, at least, think everyone else has it, and so it is Oxford’s word of the year.
Oxford says the term comes from a little book called Walden by Henry David Thoreau.
The others in Oxford’s shortlist include “Demure,” which is very mindful, “Dynamic Pricing,” “lore,” “romantasy” (the shortlist’s lone portmanteau), and the brain rot-adjacent word “slop.”
Oxford notes that “brain rot” is not a “new or recent concept,” but it has been used more frequently on social media, particularly on TikTok, this year. »
