December 3, 2024
2 min read
Why ‘Brain Rot’ Is 2024’s Word of the Year
The phrase “brain rot” spiked 230 percent from 2023 to 2024, according to the makers of the Oxford English Dictionary
“Brain rot” is the official Word of the Year for 2024, according to the Oxford English Dictionary’s publisher, Oxford University Press. Here’s how that august chronicler of English defines the phrase: brain rot is the “supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state,” resulting from the “overconsumption” of trivial material—especially stuff found on the Internet.
Brain rot is a symptom of mindless scrolling through nonsense memes and sludge content. It is the sensation of faculties warmly smothered by one too many AI-generated pictures; see the off-putting depictions, popular on Facebook, of Jesus fused with crustaceans.
Of course, the term doesn’t describe literal decomposition, which happens rapidly to most dead human brains (although, curiously, not all of them). “‘Brain rot’ speaks to one of the perceived dangers of virtual life, and how we are using our free time,” Oxford Languages president Casper Grathwohl said in a press release. “It feels like a rightful next chapter in the cultural conversation about humanity and technology.”
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The expression’s usage frequency spiked 230 percent between 2023 and 2024, the dictionary-maker says, and it was especially common this year on TikTok. It beat out five other words du jour curated by Oxford’s linguists and submitted for public voting, in which 37,000 people participated. (Another shortlisted word was “slop,” which describes the low-quality images and text churned out by large language models.)
Notably, the expression is probably most used by the people who consume or produce most of the content blamed for brain rot. Gen Z and Gen Alpha have readily adopted the phrase, Grathwohl notes, with an attitude both tongue-in-cheek and self-aware. It’s a joke, but it may have some teeth: 2024 was also a year of pronounced concerns about mental health harms and Internet use. In June U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called for warning labels on social media platforms.
To be sure, brain rot has been with us for years. Before the Internet, television was the great brain-rotter of its time. And Oxford has traced the expression to its first recorded use in Walden, the 1854 book by protohippie Henry David Thoreau. “While England endeavours to cure the potato rot,” Thoreau wrote, “will not any endeavour to cure the brain-rot—which prevails so much more widely and fatally?” Our distractions may change, but our worries and complaints about them are ageless.