10 January 2026
The American Dialect Society’s (ADS’s) selection for its 2025 Word of the Year (WOTY) is slop, that is “low-quality, high-quantity content, most typically produced by generative AI; also as a combining form for anything lacking valued produced in mass quantities.” It’s seen in words such as slopification, sloppunk, and friend slop. The compound AI slop was a nominee for last year’s Digital Word of the Year, but evidently the group decided that the single word has broken free of that phrase. The runner-up was rage-bait, with 6-7 coming in third.
Many organizations and individuals (including me) promote a word or words or the year, but the ADS is the oldest, having done so for some thirty-five years. The ADS is a 135-year-old professional organization made up of linguists, lexicographers, and others who study the languages of North America. It has published the journal American Speech for the last hundred years.
Each year in early January, the organization meets, in recent years in conjunction with the larger Linguistic Society of America (LSA). The primary purpose of the meeting is an academic conference where members present papers and further the scholarly aims of the society. In contrast, the WOTY selection is a fun diversion and an opportunity to raise public awareness about language change. In short, while the selection itself is unserious, the process can be enlightening.
I’ve been following and writing about the ADS WOTY for over two decades, and on occasion I’ve participated in the proceedings. (I did not this year.) You can read ADS press release which provides the list of winners, nominees, and vote count by clicking this link. But here I’m going to discuss my impressions of the process and the selections.
The selection occurs in two steps. The first is a nominating session, held the day before the final selection where nominations for words in the subcategories are made. Some subcategories, like Most Useful and Political Word of the Year are perennial, and ad hoc subcategories can be proposed if appropriate for that particular year. The nomination session is smaller (about fifty people last year), and as a result the discussion is livelier, more in depth, and a bit more scholarly inclined (but still fun and unserious) than the full, voting session. More importantly, terms used by more marginal and underrepresented groups are more likely to be raised and discussed in depth in this session.
The final selection is made the next night. That session is much larger, and anyone attending the LSA convention can attend, not just ADS members; some 350 were in attendance last year. Nominees in the subcategories are voted on, and nominees are made for the WOTY itself and then voted upon. If no nominee gets fifty percent of the vote on the first ballot, a runoff between the top two vote-getters is held. Because the crowd is much larger and there are time constraints, the discussion is more constrained. It’s still a good time, though; there is a tradition of running satirical commentary in the visual presentation of the nominees.
Now on to what I think of the nominees and final selections. I must note that I’m a white man of a certain age, and while I am not a curmudgeon when it comes to language, I am not up on (down with?) what the kids are saying nowadays. When I’ve attended the sessions in person, I’ve found that the conversations make me more receptive to some of the slang uses. Some of the nominees I’ve never heard before, and so I am coming into this discussion cold.
Slop is a good choice for Word of the Year, but I don’t think it was the best. In my opinion, the clear winner should have been a word that wasn’t even nominated: AI. 2025 saw the full-blown effects of generative AI hit society. It is a term that will be with us for years, if not decades, to come. AI has never been nominated, although in 2023 there was a category of AI-related WOTY. Perhaps because it is so ubiquitous and common, it has slipped by the conference attendees unnoticed. It is time the ADS recognized it.
The other nominees for WOTY are all solid. Rage-bait clearly was a thing this past year, and 6-7 got a ton of use by tweens and in the press by adults; the fact that it has already faded from use doesn’t make it any less worthy. The use of DOGE as a verb was nominated; the noun clearly played a huge role in the first part of the year, but I haven’t seen the verb used much. Reheat nachos, meaning to redo something (especially music) in an inferior fashion to the original is a new one to me too, but enough people voted for it for me to declare it legit. Amphifa, a reference to the frog costumes at anti-ICE protests is one I had never heard of, and it only got three votes; but the chuckle I got from it was worth it being nominated.
That’s AI ran away with the Most Useful honors. An excellent choice. A distant second was rage-bait. The others were fine, but rather pedestrian choices.
The term voted Most Likely to Succeed was chopped, meaning ugly or undesirable. Again, it’s one I hadn’t heard, but I am generally skeptical of slang terms succeeding in the long run; they rarely do. A much better choice would have been the runner-up, vibe-coding. That’s a term that will likely be with us years from now. I think it reflects the bias of the ADS/LSA membership not being very tech oriented.
Slop also took Digital WOTY honors. No argument here, especially as the other choices were meh at best.
The choice for Informal WOTY was 6-7, because of course. I didn’t find any of the other nominees noteworthy, not that it mattered. The choice was in the bag before the nominations began.
Finally I disagree with the choice for Most Creative. The group voted for reheat nachos. I would have gone with second place contender, amphifa, which is far and away cleverer.
Overall, this years crop was fine, but with the exception of amphifa, I found the choices to be rather uninspired. Maybe if I’d been there and heard the justifications and impassioned pleas of the nominators, I would have a different opinion.
