The Oxford Word of the Year for 2024 has been revealed, and it’s one that hits uncomfortably close to home: brain rot. Coined to describe the mental dulling caused by overconsumption of trivial online content, the term feels like a perfect reflection of a year shaped by endless scrolling and digital fatigue.
Chosen through a public vote, brain rot was selected by over 37,000 participants from a shortlist of six contenders curated by Oxford University Press, the publisher of the Oxford English Dictionary. The phrase joins a list of previous winners—rizz, climate emergency, and goblin mode—that collectively map the cultural anxieties and preoccupations of their respective years.
Oxford University Press described brain rot as capturing a specific cultural unease about how social media shapes our minds and how we spend our time. “It speaks to one of the perceived dangers of virtual life,” explained Casper Grathwohl, president of Oxford Languages. “It feels like a rightful next chapter in the cultural conversation about humanity and technology.”
Though brain rot might seem like a product of TikTok-fueled burnout, its origins stretch back to Henry David Thoreau’s 1854 work Walden. In a pointed critique of societal priorities, Thoreau wrote, “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?” His words, steeped in the transcendentalist ethos, resonate in an entirely different way in 2024, a year marked by digital overconsumption.
Gen Z and Gen Alpha have breathed new life into the term, using it across social media platforms—ironically, the very spaces often accused of causing it. Grathwohl noted this layered use of brain rot as a kind of cultural self-awareness: “It demonstrates a somewhat cheeky self-reflection among younger generations about the harmful impact of social media that they’ve inherited.”
This year marks two decades of Oxford University Press selecting a Word of the Year to encapsulate the global zeitgeist. Recent winners have underscored society’s fixation on digital culture and the shifting ways we connect. In 2023, it was rizz, shorthand for charisma, a term born and bred in internet culture. In 2022, the honor went to goblin mode, a tongue-in-cheek nod to unapologetic self-indulgence.
Grathwohl sees this evolution as a reflection of how deeply technology shapes our lives. “Looking back at the Oxford Word of the Year over the past two decades, you can see society’s growing preoccupation with how our virtual lives are evolving.”
