AI spam, fake videos, and junk content turned a centuries-old word into the perfect label for today’s internet. It’s official: 2025 was the year of slop.

To select its Word of the Year, Merriam-Webster’s editors review data on which words rose in search volume and usage, then reach consensus on which term best captures the year. Barlow told the AP that ...

Felix Salmon, Elizabeth Spiers and Emily Peck discuss a recent New York Times piece, “Living the Slop Life”. Slop is everywhere from the everything bowls we eat to the clothes we wear. Have we reached ...

SLOP—shorthand for synthetic, low-quality, overproduced content—has become the catchall for the flood of AI-generated media saturating our feeds. It’s easy to think of SLOP as just a volume problem; ...

Webster's 2025 word of the year, and the company is quick to clarify that human editors did all the selecting. According to ...