2025 was such a mess it’s virtually impossible to come up with a word or idea to capture it. I thought of an obvious one: chaos. This is what we feel when too much is going on and it’s hard to make ...

Like all of the 2020s thus far, 2025 had a lot of mess going on in the world. Thankfully we had TV and film to give us some escape from it all. We used to be able to go to social media to spend time ...

Circana released its monthly sales report for November today, shining a light on how the North American video game business is performing. Hardware sales had a particularly difficult month, with sales ...

We saw it on our phones. We ate it in our bowls. This year, “slop” was everywhere. It was so ubiquitous that it’s been named Merriam-Webster’s word of the year. Merriam-Webster, the oldest dictionary ...

Gail Flanagan received funding from the Research Ireland (formally the Irish Research Council) in 2021-2023 for PhD research unrelated to the current article. For us linguists, the flurry of “word of ...

Creepy, zany and demonstrably fake content is often called “slop.” The word’s proliferation online, in part thanks to the widespread availability of generative artificial intelligence (AI), landed it ...

Slop" was named Merriam-Webster’s 2025 Word of the Year, reflecting a surge in low-quality, mass-produced AI content. The choice mirrors public reaction to generative AI, as people encountered a flood ...

“Slop,” a term used to describe low-quality digital content, has been named word of the year by the Merriam-Webster dictionary. The dictionary defines slop as “digital content of low quality that is ...

Creepy, zany and demonstrably fake content is often called “slop.” The word's proliferation online, in part thanks to the widespread availability of generative artificial intelligence, landed it ...

Free Expression: Five words including ‘affordability,’ ‘socialism’ and ‘redistricting’ took on new, politically convenient meanings in 2025. Photo: Aaron Schwartz/Reuters/Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty ...

Macy is a writer on the AI Team. She covers how AI is changing daily life and how to make the most of it. This includes writing about consumer AI products and their real-world impact, from ...

This year it is slop. While it may harken to an image of a not-so-appetizing plop of food on a tray, or a gloopy mess left behind, the definition used for the word of the year honor is “digital ...