US EditionHere's what Merriam-Webster named its word of the year for 2025
Merriam-Webster chose "slop" to highlight the surge of AI-generated low-quality digital content in 2025, reflecting public interest and the limits of artificial intelligence.
- On December 16, 2025, Merriam‑Webster named slop its 2025 Word of the Year, citing AI‑generated content and noting its tone was often mocking rather than fearful.
- Merriam-Webster editors based the choice on lookup data and search tracking throughout the year, though the exact selection process was not clearly explained.
- Other major dictionaries also listed AI-related words, with Collins Dictionary selecting vibe coding and Cambridge including memeify, while Macquarie Dictionary and The Economist featured slop and reported high lookup interest in gerrymander, performative, touch grass, and tariff.
- The choice underscores AI's large role across workplaces, social media, music, film and dictionaries in 2025, and OpenAI's rollback of a ChatGPT update illustrates worries about AI authenticity.
- Lexicographers compile shortlists and use large corpuses—Oxford Monitor Corpus tracks 150 million words per month—and readers can vote to crown the year's word.
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20 Articles
Slop, vibe coding and glazing: AI dominates 2025's words of the year
For us linguists, the flurry of "word of the year" announcements from dictionaries and publishers is a holiday tradition as anticipated as mince pies. The words of the year aren't just a fun peek into new slang and language changes, they also tell us quite a bit about the worries, trends and obsessions of the English-speaking world.
Merriam-Webster Names “Slop” as 2025 Word of the Year
Merriam-Webster has chosen “slop” as its 2025 Word of the Year, the dictionary publisher announced on December, 14th 2025. The term is defined by Merriam-Webster as low-quality digital content produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence. Editors said the word reflected the large amount of AI-generated material encountered during the year, including unrealistic images, deceptive online content, automated writing, and similar …
Unbelievable images, nightmare videos... The Merriam-Webster dictionary chose the word "slop" to embody the year 2025. A term that reflects the wave of poor quality content generated by IA that inundates social networks.
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