What is Brain rot, the Oxford University 2024 word of the year?

Are you spending hours scrolling mindlessly on Instagram reels and TikTok? If so, you might be suffering from brain rot, which has become the Oxford word of the year.

It is a term that captures concerns about the impact of consuming excessive amounts of low-quality online content, especially on social media. The word’s usage saw an increase of 230% in its frequency from 2023 to 2024.

Psychologist and Oxford University Professor, Andrew Przybylski says the popularity of the word is a “symptom of the time we’re living in”.

Brain rot beat five other shortlisted words including demure, Romantasy and dynamic pricing.

Brain rot is defined as the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material considered to be trivial or unchallenging,

The first recorded use of brain rot dates much before the creation of the internet – it was written down in 1854 by Henry David Thoreau in his book Walden.

He criticises society’s tendency to devalue complex ideas and how this is part of a general decline in mental and intellectual effort.

It leads him to ask: “While England endeavours to cure the potato rot, will not any endeavour to cure the brain-rot – which prevails so much more widely and fatally?”

The word initially gained traction on social media among Gen Z and Gen Alpha communities, but it’s now being used in the mainstream as a way to describe low-quality, low-value content found on social media.

Prof Przybylski says “there’s no evidence of brain rot actually being a thing”.

“Instead it describes our dissatisfaction with the online world and it’s a word that we can use to bundle our anxieties that we have around social media.”

Casper Grathwohl, President of Oxford Languages, says looking back at the Oxford Word of the Year over the last two decades “you can see society’s growing preoccupation with how our virtual lives are evolving, the way internet culture is permeating so much of who we are and what we talk about”.

“Last year’s winning word, ‘rizz,’ was an interesting example of how language is increasingly formed, shaped, and shared within online communities.

“Brain rot speaks to one of the perceived dangers of virtual life, and how we are using our free time.”

• Demure (adj.): Of a person: reserved or restrained in appearance or behaviour. Of clothing: not showy, ostentatious, or overly revealing
• Dynamic pricing (n.): The practice of varying the price for a product or service to reflect changing market conditions; in particular, the charging of a higher price at a time of greater demand
• Lore (n.): A body of (supposed) facts, background information, and anecdotes relating to someone or something, regarded as knowledge required for full understanding or informed discussion of the subject in question
• Romantasy (n.): A genre of fiction combining elements of romantic fiction and fantasy, typically featuring themes of magic, the supernatural, or adventure alongside a central romantic storyline
• Slop (n.): Art, writing, or other content generated using artificial intelligence, shared and distributed online in an indiscriminate or intrusive way, and characterized as being of low quality, inauthentic, or inaccurate

Oxford University dictionary is not the only one to have a word of the year, last month Cambridge Dictionary announced that manifest was its winner.

The traditional definition of manifest included the adjective “easily noticed or obvious” and the noun “to show something clearly through signs or actions”.

It now includes “to manifest” in the sense of “to imagine achieving something you want, in the belief doing so will make it more likely to happen”.

It comes off the back of a global wellness trend endorsed by celebrities including singer Dua Lipa who said she manifested her headline slot at Glastonbury.

Collins dictionary also announced in November that its word of the year was brat – a word that has been everywhere over the last couple of months thanks to Charli XCX’s viral album.

Brat is defined as someone with a “confident, independent and hedonistic attitude”.

It started as the name of her number one album, but it has arguably grown into a cultural movement for some, with people adopting the brat way of life.

Another internet phenomenon has inspired the Dictionary.com word of the year which is demure.

The word took off in August after content creator Jools Lebron, posted on TikTok abut her demure work outfit and mindful make-up.

The “very demure, very mindful” trend took off after that and the satirical idea pokes fun at the stereotypical ideas of femininity.