According to Oxford University Press, which publishes the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the term ‘brain rot’ is defined, without much explanation, as “a presumed deterioration in a person’s mental or intellectual condition” associated with overdosing on online content. It works. — like a TikTok video.
Brain rot is also the costume’s word of the year for 2024, given its prominence in pop culture this year. As the New York Times explains, the organization combs through a corpus of “nearly 26 billion words” from news sources around the English-speaking world to identify “the mood and conversation that shaped 2024.”
Brain rot does not appear in the OED. The same goes for ‘Liz’ and ‘Goblin Mode’, which were selected as words of the year in 2023 and 2022, respectively. Despite ostensible recognition from Oxford University Press (Oxford University’s publishing house), it has yet to demonstrate the sustained and widespread usage that the OED editors first wanted to see.
You may have to wait a long time. Among the OED’s more recent additions is ‘tech-savvy’, whose earliest use dates back to the 1980s.
