Consuming excessive amounts of low-quality online content? Then this word is already happening to you.
Just last week, The POST reported on the Word of the Year Picks of trusted English dictionaries Cambridge, Collins, and Dictionary.com, which are “manifest,” “brat,” and “demure,” respectively. A common denominator among the three words are their strong ties to social media, proving how these platforms exert influence on our language.
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Joining them is Oxford English Dictionary, which recently released its pick for Word of the Year, a word which quite unsurprisingly at this point, is also social media famous. In a statement, the venerable dictionary announced “brain rot” as its pick, following a public vote in which more than 37,000 people participated. “Brain rot” also made the shortlist of Dictionary.com.
Per Oxford, its language experts came up with a shortlist of six words to reflect the moods and conversations that have helped shape this year. “After two weeks of public voting and widespread conversation, our experts came together to consider the public’s input, voting results, and our language data, before declaring ‘brain rot’ as the definitive Word of the Year for 2024,” it further explained.
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So what does ‘brain rot’ mean?
“Brain rot,” as defined by the 140-year-old dictionary, is “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging. Also: something characterized as likely to lead to such deterioration.”
The dictionary’s experts observed that “brain rot” gained new prominence this year as a term used to capture concerns about the impact of consuming excessive amounts of low-quality online content, especially on social media (methinks many Filipinos can relate to this). The word saw a massive surge in usage frequency by 230% between 2023 and 2024.
But “brain rot,” dear readers, is far from being a newly coined word. In fact, its first recorded use can be traced all the way back to 1854 in Henry David Thoreau’s book Walden. The book chronicles his experiences of “living a simple lifestyle in the natural world.”
In the book, Thoreau criticizes society’s tendency to devalue complex ideas, or those that can be interpreted in multiple ways, in favor of simple ones, seeing this as indicative of a general decline in mental and intellectual effort. He said: “While England endeavors to cure the potato rot, will not any endeavor to cure the brain-rot—which prevails so much more widely and fatally?”
With social media being social media, the word has seen a metamorphosis and a newfound popularity. It initially gained traction on online platforms—particularly on TikTok among Gen Z and Gen Alpha users—but “brain rot” is now seeing a more widespread use, even in legacy journalism, amid concerns about the negative impact of too much exposure and consumption of content on the internet.
Though it still carries echoes of Thoreau’s meaning, “brain rot” is now more commonly used to describe both the cause and effect of consuming low-quality, low-value content found online, as well as the resulting negative impact that this type of content is perceived to have on an individual or society.
Thanks partly to the word, there are now broader and more serious conversations about the potential adverse impact that excessively consuming “brain-rot” inducing content might have on mental health, particularly among children.
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20 years of Oxford’s Word of the Year
Speaking on this year’s selection process and the 2024 pick, Casper Grathwohl, president of Oxford Languages, said: “It’s been insightful and deeply moving to see language lovers all over the world participate and help us select the Oxford Word of the Year 2024.”
Grathwohl also looked back on 20 years of Words of the Year. “Looking back at the Oxford Word of the Year over the past two decades, you can see society’s growing preoccupation with how our virtual lives are evolving, the way internet culture is permeating so much of who we are and what we talk about.”
He gave as an example the word “rizz,” Oxford Dictionary’s winning word last year, which is proof of how language is increasingly formed, shaped, and shared within online communities. On this year’s pick, he said: “‘Brain rot’ speaks to one of the perceived dangers of virtual life, and how we are using our free time. It feels like a rightful next chapter in the cultural conversation about humanity and technology. It’s not surprising that so many voters embraced the term, endorsing it as our choice this year.”
Over the two decades that the Oxford English Dictionary has chosen its annual Word of the Year, the most common trends observed include technology, social media and online culture, climate change, and geopolitics. These themes can also be seen in the other words that made it to the dictionary’s shortlist this year: “demure,” “dynamic pricing,” “lore,” “romantasy,” and “slop.”
Recent Words of the Year selected by the Oxford English Dictionary include “goblin mode” for 2022 and “vax” for 2021. In 2020, Oxford Languages concluded that the year “cannot
be neatly accommodated into one single word,” especially amid a global pandemic. It then released a guide with all of the selected words for that year which you can access here.
We’re still awaiting Merriam-Webster Dictionary’s choice for this year. Last year, it picked “authentic,” with Oxford winner “rizz” as its the runner-up.
