We’re all losing it — Oxford’s Word of the Year 2024 is brain rot

Do you indulge in endless, pointless scrolling on your phone for hours? You’re not alone! Oxford University Press (OUP) named brain rot as its Word of the Year for 2024.

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 (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging. Also: something characterised as likely to lead to such deterioration”.

According to OUP, the result comes after a public vote, in which more than 37,000 people voted for their favourite word after OUP’s language experts created a shortlist of six words to reflect the moods and conversations that helped shape the past year. The list comprised of brain rot, demure, lore, slop, romantasy, and dynamic pricing.

Brain rot was chosen after OUP “experts came together to consider the public’s input, voting results, and language data”.

They noticed that brain rot gained new prominence this year as a term used to capture concerns about the impact of consuming excessive amounts of low-quality online content, especially on social media. The term increased in usage frequency by 230 per cent between 2023 and 2024.

“The term has taken on new significance in the digital age, especially over the past 12 months. Initially gaining traction on social media platforms — particularly on TikTok among Gen Z and Gen Alpha communities — ‘brain rot’ is now seeing more widespread use, such as in mainstream journalism, amidst societal concerns about the negative impact of overconsuming online content.

“In 2024, ‘brain rot’ is used to describe both the cause and effect of this, referring to low-quality, low-value content found on social media and the internet, as well as the subsequent negative impact that consuming this type of content is perceived to have on an individual or society.”

The first recorded use of brain rot was in American essayist Henry David Thoreau’s 1854 book Walden which reports his experiences of living a simple lifestyle in the natural world.

“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?” Thoreau wrote.

However, now, brain rot refers to hundreds of thousands of pointless social media posts and the effect they have on users — case in point, the videos of people dropping jars on stairs so they roll along and break. The purpose? There is none, which is the whole meaning of brain rot.

So, what’s your favourite brain rot content?