It’s not just you. Oxford University Press, the publisher of the august Oxford English Dictionary, is also going a bit fuzzy between the ears.

After digging through its enormous database, it has chosen “brain rot” — specifically, the kind brought on by digital overload — as its 2024 Word of the Year.

It’s been quite a journey for “brain rot”, which triumphed over a shortlist of contenders including “lore”, “demure”, “romantasy”, “dynamic pricing” and “slop”. According to Oxford, its earliest known appearance was in 1854, in Walden, Henry David Thoreau’s account of moving alone to a cabin in the woods.

“While England endeavours to cure the potato-rot,” Thoreau lamented, “will not any endeavour to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally?”

The answer, apparently, is no. These days, according to Oxford, it’s often invoked by young people on social media to describe the “supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state”, particularly stemming from overconsumption of trivial online content.

That usage surged by about 230 per cent over the past year. Casper Grathwohl, the president of Oxford Languages, the company’s dictionary division, said the term’s rise reflects the breakneck speed of social media-driven language change. “With ‘brain rot’,” he said, “it’s a phenomenon of young people skewering language trends on TikTok, almost exactly after they themselves have churned out that language.”

Oxford’s Word of the Year is based on usage evidence drawn from its continually updated corpus of some 26 billion words, which is drawn from news sources across the English-speaking world. The idea, according to the announcement, is to reflect “the moods and conversations that have shaped 2024”.

As in the past few years, Oxford invited the public to vote on the shortlist. The winner was chosen by the publisher’s team of experts, based on the vote (roughly 37,000 people weighed in) and further analysis.

New York Times News Service