Merriam-Webster names 'slop' its 2025 word of the year
The dictionary defined the word as low-quality digital content produced in quantity by AI, citing a spike in lookups against runners-up including 'gerrymander' and 'six seven.'
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Merriam-Webster named “slop” its word of the year for 2025, defining the sense that drove the selection as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.” The dictionary said lookups of the word tracked the flood of AI-generated material — absurd videos, off-kilter advertising images, fabricated news items — reaching into everyday browsing and social feeds over the year. The word’s older senses (soft mud, then food waste, then general rubbish) date to the 1700s and 1800s; the AI-content meaning was its newest.
Runners-up included “gerrymander,” “touch grass,” “performative,” “tariff,” “conclave” and “six seven,” a slang term that had itself spread largely through short-form video.
The selection registered the mainstreaming of “AI slop” as a term of ordinary complaint rather than an insider phrase, following two years in which cheap, high-volume generative image and video tools had made low-effort synthetic content a visible feature of social platforms, search results and even news outlets. Merriam-Webster’s word-of-the-year picks are based on spikes in dictionary lookups rather than any formal cultural survey.