Merriam-Webster Declares ‘Slop’ as 2025 Word of the Year

Merriam-Webster names 'slop' word of the year, highlighting AI's role in content creation.

Merriam-Webster, a leading American dictionary, has declared ‘slop’ as the word of the year. It refers to “low-quality digital content, typically generated on a large scale by artificial intelligence.”

“Like slime or mud, slop has the moist sound of something you don’t want to touch. Slop seeps into everything,” the company wrote.

According to the company, in the age of artificial intelligence, this term is meant to convey “a tone that is less about fear and more about mockery” towards the technology.

“It’s such a vivid word. It is part of the transformative technology — AI — and what people find fascinating, annoying, and a bit amusing,” commented Merriam-Webster President Greg Barlow.

In 2025, slop was ubiquitous as journalists and experts attempted to describe how platforms like OpenAI’s Sora and Google’s Gemini Veo are transforming the internet.

Thanks to a new generation of media content generators, there are books, podcasts, songs, TV commercials, and films created with the help of artificial intelligence. According to one study, nearly 75% of new web materials are related to AI in some form.

The emergence of these tools has even led to the so-called “slop economy,” where the surplus of such content can be used to generate advertising revenue.

Critics fear the rise of a polarized digital society, where some can afford higher-quality paid material, while others cannot. The latter will receive a “digital diet of slop, poor in informational value.”

Merriam-Webster is a publisher and dictionary of the English language in the United States. It is considered one of the most authoritative sources for meanings, pronunciations, word histories, and proper usage.

It is not the only one to assign the title to an AI-related term. For Macquarie Dictionary, it was AI slop, Oxford Dictionary chose ragebait, and Collins Dictionary settled on vibe coding.

Back in 2019, the Chinese magazine “Yao Wen Jiao Zi” published a traditional list of the most popular words and phrases. Among others, it included the term “blockchain.”