Following a public vote that saw more than 37,000 people worldwide have their say, Oxford University Press has named ‘brain rot’ as the Oxford Word of the Year 2024.
Selected from a shortlist of six contenders—which also included “demure,” “slop,” “dynamic pricing,” “romantasy,” and “lore”—the term emerged as the winner following a two-week public vote, supplemented by OUP’s analysis of language data and expert commentary.
The selection process, open to the public since 2022, involved a combination of public voting, analysis of OUP’s vast 26-billion-word corpus of global language data, and expert evaluation of public commentary on the shortlisted words. This is the third consecutive year OUP has engaged the public in this manner.
“Brain rot,” first recorded in Henry David Thoreau’s 1854 book Walden, has experienced a resurgence in 2024, largely due to its use in expressing concerns about the negative effects of excessive consumption of low-quality online content, particularly on social media platforms. Initially gaining traction on platforms like TikTok, primarily among Gen Z and Gen Alpha users, its usage has expanded into mainstream journalism and wider societal discourse. The term is now used to describe both the low-quality content itself and the perceived detrimental effects it has on individuals and society.
Casper Grathwohl, President of Oxford Languages, commented on the selection, highlighting the global participation in the voting process and noting the ongoing societal preoccupation with the evolving nature of virtual life and internet culture. He pointed out that “brain rot” follows “rizz” (2023) as a word reflecting this preoccupation, but this time focusing on a perceived negative aspect of online engagement. He found it particularly interesting that the term was adopted and amplified by Gen Z and Gen Alpha, the generations most immersed in the digital content the term critiques, showcasing a form of self-aware commentary on the potential downsides of their digital environment.
The Oxford Word of the Year aims to capture a defining theme of the past year, identifying words with lasting cultural significance or reflecting a snapshot of contemporary society. Past winners, chosen by OUP’s experts, include “selfie” (2013), “climate emergency” (2019), and “vax” (2021).
‘Brain rot’ is a colloquial term, associated with informal contexts. Etymologically speaking, both elements of the compound come from the Germanic core vocabulary of English. With both ‘brain’ and ‘rot’ commonly used in everyday language, the compound ‘brain rot’ is instantly understandable, in the same way that the concept it refers to is recognizable to anyone familiar with the engrossing nature of the internet in 2024.
The term has undergone a fascinating evolution since its first recorded use in Thoreau’s book Walden, which reports his experiences of living a simple lifestyle in the natural world. As part of his conclusions, he criticizes society’s tendency to devalue complex ideas, or those that can be interpreted in multiple ways, in favour of simple ones. He sees this as indicative of a general decline in mental and intellectual effort, leading him to ask, “While England endeavours to cure the potato rot, will not any endeavour to cure the brain-rot – which prevails so much more widely and fatally?”
As a preoccupation that focuses on the loss of intellectual ability through the overconsumption of popular culture and types of entertainment, the history of ‘brain rot’ spans centuries. At one time, there were concerns that reading too many novels or newspapers could affect cognitive performance, and in the twentieth century, television was informally identified as causing ‘brain rot’. In a 1976 report in the Massachusetts Daily Collegian, the author mentions that after three consecutive evenings of watching television to investigate depictions of violence, ‘brain rot began to set in’.Over the past year, ‘brain rot’ has been used more specifically and consistently with reference to online culture. Initially by and within online communities, often in a humorous or self-deprecating manner, it is strongly associated with certain types of content. This includes creator Alexey Gerasimov’s viral Skibidi Toilet video series, which features animated humanoid toilets, and user-generated ‘only in Ohio’ memes, which reference bizarre incidents in the state.This content has given rise to emerging ‘brain rot language’, such as ‘Skibidi’, meaning something nonsensical, and ‘Ohio’, meaning something embarrassing or weird, reflecting a growing trend of words originating in viral online culture, before spreading offline into the ‘real world’. Interestingly, younger generations have also started using the term in descriptions of people who frequently incorporate online slang or memes into ‘real life’ conversation.
Now gaining momentum is a broader, more serious conversation about the potential negative impact that excessively consuming this content might have on mental health, particularly in children and young people. Earlier this year, a mental health treatment centre in the US even published advice online about how to recognize and avoid ‘brain rot’.
Speaking about the evolving use of the term ‘brain rot’ at the recent Oxford Word of the Year launch event, Katherine Martin, Product Director for Oxford Languages, said: “With ‘brain rot’, we see this concern about how our capacity for thought might be negatively impacted by consuming a lot of algorithmic online content, like short-form video. There’s an anxiety coming through about striking the right balance between the online world and losing touch with the real world. I think it’s great that young people also use this term to refer to the type of language used by people who overindulge in online content, which is wonderfully recursive and self-referential.”
