https://americandialect.org/2025-word-of-the-year-is-slop/

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2025 Word of the Year Is "Slop"

January 9, 2026

New Orleans Marriott-Jan. 9--The American Dialect Society, in its 36th
annual words-of-the-year vote, selected slop as the Word of the Year
for 2025. More than three hundred attendees took part in the
deliberations and voting, in an event hosted in conjunction with the
Linguistic Society of America's annual meeting.

The word slop was recognized for its widespread use for low-quality,
high-quantity content, most typically produced by generative AI.
While AI slop was a nominee in the American Dialect Society's 2024
Word of the Year vote, in 2025 slop could stand on its own, with the
AI context often implicitly understood. Slop was also recognized as a
productive combining form to describe anything of little value
generated in mass quantities.

Presiding at the Jan. 9 voting session were Ben Zimmer, chair of the
ADS New Words Committee, and Dr. Kelly Elizabeth Wright of the
University of Wisconsin-Madison. 

"Slop isn't a new word. It has moved from the pig sty, to the
algorithm, and now forms new compounds such as sloppunk,
slopification, and friend slop," Dr. Wright said. "This productivity
has no end in sight." 

Word of the Year is interpreted in its broader sense as "vocabulary
item"--not just words but also phrases, compounds, and affixes. The
items do not have to be brand-new, but they have to be newly
prominent or notable in the past year.

The vote is the longest-running such vote anywhere, the only one not
tied to commercial interests, and the word-of-the-year event up to
which all others lead. It is fully informed by the members' expertise
in the study of words, but it is far from a solemn occasion. 

Members in the 136-year-old organization include linguists,
lexicographers, etymologists, grammarians, historians, researchers,
writers, editors, students, and independent scholars. In conducting
the vote, they act in fun and do not pretend to be officially
inducting words into the English language. Instead, they are
highlighting that language change is normal, ongoing, and
entertaining.

In a companion vote, sibling organization the American Name Society
selected "No Kings" as Name of the Year for 2025 in its 22nd annual
name-of-the-year contest. Further information can be found on the
society's website, https://americannamesociety.org.

  * Read the full press release, including all winners, candidates,
    and vote tallies for all candidates.
  * All previous years' winners are listed here.

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The mission of the American Dialect Society, a not-for-profit
organization, is to encourage the study of any aspect of all
languages and dialects used or found in North America (as well as
associated islands in the Pacific and the Atlantic) and in the
Caribbean Basin, and the languages that influence them: spoken,
signed, or written, modern or historical, Indigenous or introduced,
common or rare.

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