Brain Rot: What the Oxford Word of the Year Tells Us About 2024
Dan Clayton traces the remarkably prescient twenty year record of the Oxford Word of the Year award
The announcement of Oxford’s Word of the Year 2024 today, marks the 20th anniversary of what’s become a fixture in the lexicographical world – or 20 years of a neat marketing gimmick for hard-to-flog dictionaries, if you’re being cynical.
This year’s winner, brain rot – defined as “supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as a result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging” – came from a shortlist of six, with a public vote taken into consideration for the ultimate winner.
The shortlist spanned the usual mix of older words repackaged for online use: brain rot, first recorded as far back as 1854 in Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, and slop, in use from 14th Century to describe some kind of liquid waste, reminding us that low quality content hasn’t always been the sole preserve of the terminally online; alongside words that have been popularised through viral online use or exasperated media discussion – demure and dynamic pricing respectively – and then terms that have been either assembled from existing parts like Frankenstein’s monster, as with romantasy, although, in this case, more likely from the quivering pecs and thrusting loins of some kind of sexy vampire-centaur hybrid, or words that have developed a new layer of meanings, such as lore, which no longer simply refers to arcane and esoteric knowledge passed on from generation to generation, but is now applied equally to how well you know your Dr Who or Pokémon.
As the team behind Oxford WOTY say, their aim is to provide “a window into language and cultural change” and a look back through previous shortlists offers just that – often pointing to influential world events, technological advancements and the growing influence of online culture and well, influencers (or in the case of a 2023 nominee de-influencing), but along the way there have been a few clangers too.
The lexicographer Allan Metcalf, author of Predicting New Words: The Secrets of Their Success, came up with his own measure for judging the impact and staying power of new words. His FUDGE scale - Frequency of use, Unobtrusiveness, Diversity of users and situations, Generation of other forms and meanings and Endurance of the concept – is quite a handy one to use to assess the past WOTY nominees and winners.
Some previous winners show both frequency of use and endurance. Selfie (winner in 2013) was a sure-fire hit and according to the OED, recorded a 17,000% growth year-on-year in the Oxford corpus, their database of language usage. Vape might even have been ahead of its time, winning in 2014, but only achieving wider acknowledgement a few years later. Podcast (2005) took a little longer to hit similar levels, perhaps reflecting the slow but steady growth of the form itself until it hit the dizzy heights of nearly 60 appearances per million words (for comparison, selfie’s peak was about 13 per million words in 2014-15). Maybe it was the global pandemic that kicked podcast to its peak in 2021-22, because as we discussed with Fiona McPherson from the OED on the Lexis podcast last month, every idiot’s got a podcast these days.
And podcast is one of those words that has probably outlived its constituent parts too. Formed from a compound of iPod and the -cast bit of broadcast, the OUP notes that “iPods have all but disappeared, while podcasts are as popular as ever”. A bit like those acronyms that just slip into the language like a scuba (self-contained underwater breathing apparatus) diver into water, they float around in the lexicon unobtrusively, without people knowing where their constituent parts even came from.
Other Oxford WOTYs haven’t necessarily fared as well as these, however, perhaps falling foul of Metcalf’s ‘Unobtrusiveness’ measure, but perhaps just not lasting because the concept didn’t last very long. While 2022’s goblin mode was the winner of a public vote, it never really spread much further than the pages of the newspapers that reported on its victory that year or the murkier corners of the web from where it arose (or didn’t – probably preferring to stay rotting in its fart sack). And the less said about youthquake (2017) the better…
The face with tears of joy emoji which won in 2015 (or Unicode +1F602 to give it its full name, and presumably one that Elon Musk is saving for his next offspring) was perhaps a slightly left field choice too – maybe emoji would have been a simpler one – but you could see where they were coming from with that one, and generally Oxford have been less in thrall to the eddies of online currents than some other dictionary makers (Australian dictionary Macquarie’s pod slurping (2007) and googleganger (2010) being prime examples of why that can age badly).
While most of the Oxford WOTYs can be loosely credited to broad times and places, with a picture of usage building up from the Oxford corpus, omnishambles was one of the few to have a specific date of birth, being coined as it was on the BBC political drama The Thick of It in 2009. There are not many others that have such a precise moment of conception, although catchphrases such as simples (2009) and bovvered (2006) come from particular TV shows and characters (Compare the Market’s advertising meerkats and the Catherine Tate Show’s Lauren in these cases).
Some patterns are hard to ignore: the waves of coronavirus words of 2020 led to Oxford deciding not to select a single winner that year, and the impact of the virus on the world and the world’s discourse still hangs on with vax being made WOTY in 2021. Like a lot of successful neologisms, words that can be combined with others can be very productive (the ‘G’ for ‘Generation of other forms’ of Metcalf’s FUDGE scale) and lead to a longer shelf life. With vax, came vaxxed, double-vaxxed, unvaxxed and even anti-vaxxer. Let’s hope that with President-elect Donald Trump’s proposed pick for Health, RFK Jr in post, 2025 will not be the year that MAGA becomes GAMA (Give American Measles Again) and sanity somehow prevails. But an omnishambles probably beckons.
The signs are that 2024’s winner, brain rot has already started to form new combinations – brain rot slang and brain rot language (terms like skibidi, sigma and even the 2023 winner rizz often being described with this label) for example – but as a compound word already, it’s unlikely to be as flexible as vax. What it lacks in generative power, it might well make up for in its diversity of users and situations (Metcalf’s ‘D’ in FUDGE). The Oxford WOTY team point to the fact that brain rot is already being discussed in terms of the issue of young people’s screen time, making an appearance in advice from mental health organisations and has previously (in 1976, to be precise) been applied to the effects of a different kind of media content – television – on the impressionable mind. Perhaps it is this wider quality (or in this case, lack of quality) that makes brain rot an astute choice this year, capturing as it does both the symptoms and the causes of degraded online life.
And speaking of such things, with Trump set for a second term (and third…?) all those words that have been chosen around climate change may well be pushed to the front of our minds again. Oxford WOTYs have often foregrounded these – carbon-neutral (2006), carbon footprint (2007) and climate emergency (2019) – with 2019 being the year the whole shortlist had a climate emergency theme.
Whether Oxford Word of the Year gets another twenty years may well depend on whether we as a species address the global problems raised in some of these words, be they the degradation of our minds and lives through consuming low quality online content, or the degradation of our natural world through human action and inaction.
So, will we get another 20 years of WOTY? That depends on whether we are still around, I suppose.
Dan Clayton is an education consultant at the English and Media Centre in London. He has taught English for more than 20 years and is the author of Attitudes to Language, co-author of Language Diversity and World Englishes and co-editor of Knowing About Language. He runs @EngLangBlog on Bluesky and is part of the Lexis podcast team.