Terminology - WOTTIES 2025 'slop' the American Dialect Society Word of the Year

 Copyright © Françoise Herrmann

On January 9th 2026, The prestigious 137-year-old American Dialect Society (ADL) voted slop—prefix, suffix, and noun—as the 2025 Word of the Year (WOTY). The ADL defines slop as: 

*slop, n: low-quality, high-quantity content, most typically produced by generative AI; also as a combining form for anything lacking value produced in mass quantities.

In fact, the ADL actually promoted one of its 2024 contenders for Word of the Year to the WOTY in 2025.  Indeed, AI slop was already voted as a contender for the Society’s 2024 Computer Word of the Year. 

In 2025, the promotion of slop to the Word of the Year was explained by the quantum leap in artificial intelligence (AI) use, which in turn led to a concomitant increase in the production of AI-generated slop. An increase only paralleled by the grammatically diversified increase in the use of the term slop. 

For example ‘slop’ functionning as a prefix:

• slop economy - referring to the ecosystem of websites and social media accounts that churn out endless AI content to harvest advertising revenue.
• slop bot - automated accounts that churn out slop to manipulate search rankings.
• slop feeds - search engine results that have become saturated with low-value, repetitive AI outputs.
• slop content – filler media such as absurd videos or nonsensical AI-written articles.

For example ‘slop’ functioning as a suffix:

• AI-slop - content generated by LLMs that is considered repetitive or uninspired.
• brain-slop - content designed for mindless scrolling.
• engagement slop - posts created solely as bait to generate likes or comments.
• friendslop - low-cost, chaotic, indie cooperative gaming trend.

And ‘slop’ functioning as a noun, such as: slopification and slopper (someone overly reliant on generative AI). 

A new constellation of slop terms, orbiting around AI-generated slop, indicating that slop has definitely migrated from its 16th-century origins—referring to slushy mud—to the digital world.  Thus, a year’s worth of language use ended up being crowned by the term slop-—in all of its grammatical variations.

References
American Dialect Society (ADL) (website)
https://americandialect.org/ 
Zimmer, B. and Dr. K. E. Wright (Jan. 9, 2026). American Dialect Society selects ‘slop’ as 2025 Word of the Year. ADL 2025 WOTY Press Release. 
https://americandialect.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/2025-Word-of-the-Year-PRESS-RELEASE.pdf

All the Words of the Year, 1990 to present.  American Dialect Society. 

https://americandialect.org/woty/all-of-the-words-of-the-year-1990-to-present/#2024