PICKING A WORD of the year is not easy. In the past the American Dialect Society has gone with “tender-age shelters” (2018) and “-ussy” (2022). The Oxford English Dictionary (oed) has caused conniptions by opting for things like “youthquake” (2017) and “goblin mode” (2022). If you cannot remember why those terms were big that year, that is the point: the exercise is not a straightforward one.
Sometimes a single suitable word is not at hand, so a phrase is chosen instead; other times the word simply seems jarring. Middle-aged lexicographers are often tempted to crown a bit of youth slang, but such terms are transient and sound out of date before the press release is published.
The Economist’s choice for 2025 is a single word. It is representative, if not of the whole year, at least of much of the feeling of living in it. It is not a new word, but it is being used in a new way. You may not like it, but you are living with it. And it is probably here to stay.
But first, a few subcategory winners. The clear winner for foreign word of the year, nominated by several of our China correspondents, was neijuan, Mandarin for “involution”. It describes the increasingly cut-throat competition between businesses, such as those that make electric vehicles, despite the diminishing returns. It has also become a term used by workers to refer to the sense of running ever faster on a treadmill to get nowhere.
Finance is a good place to look for words of the year because trends move fast, and its denizens like neologisms. TACO is this year’s favourite. Coined by Robert Armstrong, a journalist at the Financial Times, it stands for “Trump Always Chickens Out” and points to the many tariff fights Donald Trump has picked and then backed down from. Another strong contender was the “debasement trade”. In recent months investors have been buying up assets such as gold as they are worried that overspending governments are going to destroy the value of their currencies and other assets linked to them.
There were plenty of slang options, too. Dictionary.com has chosen “67” (read as “six seven”), a ubiquitous bit of youth-speak that, as the lexicographers there admit, has no fixed meaning: instead, it “has all the hallmarks of being brain rot”—a term that Oxford Dictionaries made its word of the year in 2024. “Brain rot” is defined as a state caused by overconsumption of mindlessly entertaining junk, particularly online. The term is also applied to the junk causing the mental decline.
Readers should prepare themselves: they will probably experience brain rot more often, thanks to our word of the year. Our pick’s rise was spurred by OpenAI’s release of Sora, a generative artificial-intelligence (ai) platform that can create videos based on a prompt. Suddenly social-media feeds were filled with such clips. A term that started circulating in the early years of generative AI is now everywhere: “slop”.
The word, of course, is far from new: the oed’s first citation is from the 15th century. Its meaning has evolved from mud and slush, through a weak liquid used as a poorly nourishing food, to any kind of food scraps, to nonsense or rubbish.
Slop merchants clog up the internet with drivel. Enter a health question on Google and see how many of the top results are brand-new webpages with AI-written prose. Or scroll through Instagram and see how long it takes to come across a video that is made up of fake clips and an AI voiceover. Or head to X and see if you can distinguish the real MAGA accounts from those that were revealed (by a new “About this account” feature) to be slop-shops in Pakistan, Nigeria or Thailand.
It is distressing to imagine a world drowning in slop, so think of the positives. If the news ecosystem is sodden with slop, trust in established organisations might rebound. (Research has found that, after being asked to distinguish AI photographs from real ones, test subjects show a greater willingness to pay for a respectable newspaper.) If social-media sites become congested with slop, either those platforms will have to get serious about content moderation or else their users will shut them off. A case, then, for sloptimism? ■