The print edition of Merriam-Webster was once a touchstone of authority and stability. Then the internet brought about a ...

This linguistic shift reflects growing concerns about artificial intelligence’s impact on digital content quality and ...

Creepy, zany and demonstrably fake content is often called “slop.” The word’s proliferation online, in part thanks to the ...

There was a time when Urban Dictionary felt essential. Twenty-six years ago, when then-college freshman Aaron Peckham founded ...

If you worked as a typist for Merriam-Webster in the pre-internet era, one of your tasks would have been typing out every ...

Runners up included "gerrymander," "touch grass," "performative" and "tariff." It's messy, it's meaningless and it's everywhere: "slop" has been crowned as Merriam-Webster's 2025 Word of the Year. The ...

Creepy, zany and demonstrably fake content is often called “slop.” The word’s proliferation online, in part thanks to the widespread availability of generative artificial intelligence, ...

The dictionary has selected one word every year since 2003 to capture and make sense of the current moment. Here’s Merriam-Webster’s 2025 word of the year – and what it means.

"Slop" was first used in the 1700s to mean soft mud, but it evolved more generally to mean something of little value.