In a nod to the AI era, Merriam-Webster has crowned the term slop as its 2025 Word of the Year, defining it as digital content of low quality that is produced in quantity by artificial intelligence.
The label captures a growing pile of AI-generated material washing over social networks, search results, and the broader internet, where users increasingly encounter sloppy outputs labeled as innovative tools.
Barlow, the dictionary’s president, explained that slop is a telling reflection of a transformative technology—one that people both find fascinating and, at times, ridiculous. He noted the term’s usefulness as a shorthand for a pattern of online content that many would rather ignore.
Editors determine the Word of the Year by analyzing spikes in search volumes and usage, then converging on a term that best embodies the year. The surge in interest around slop signals a wider public awareness of the prevalence of fake or low-quality content online.
The choice sits within a broader trend of linguistic responses to AI, with Cambridge selecting hallucinates in 2023 to describe AI’s tendency to generate plausible-but-false information, and Oxford and Cambridge highlighting other AI-adjacent coinages this year. Historically, slop echoed earlier meanings of waste or rubbish, now repurposed to describe unwanted AI output.
