Macquarie Dictionary names ‘AI slop’ as 2025 word of the year
Body horror vs Femgor. Plot armor v Howcatchem. Each challenge was intense, and this was just in Art, the first of 13 categories, with the panel looking for a single overall winner. FYI, femgore (a subgenre of horror featuring female protagonists in bloodbaths) has beaten its flashy rivals, paving the way for the next category: Business.
Robotext and dynamic pricing. You get the picture, a Zoom chat between six word enthusiasts, from Victoria Morgan, editor-in-chief of The Guardian. macquarieand dictionary friends Carl Bodnaruk and Rebecca Geddes, as well as ABC’s editorial policy advisor Tiger Webb and yours truly. The atmosphere was optimistic, the voting was active. But After Work (congratulations, attention economy) we’ve hit our first hurdle.
The panel, including me, whittled down 65 contestants to a winner who would tempt our robot overlords.Credit: Aresna Villanueva/Sydney Morning Herald
Each year will have its own swamp categories, with these subsets engaging the panel in surreal discussions. In the midst of COVID, these categories were Health and Politics; To see covidiot overtake Delta or to see the beast go around net zero. However, in 2025, two pits have emerged: Spoken Language and Internet.
Slang and cyberspace, in short, the deepening incursions of Alpha Gen and next-generation artificial intelligence. Come to Colloquial, three words or phrases if you prefer, elbowed for victory. (That said, all 65 contestants this year are “lexical items” rather than “words,” but the pedantic label of lexical item isn’t getting anyone excited.) The Roman Empire was my pick, a nod to the particular obsession we all have, inspired by TikTok’s discovery that most middle-aged men think about the Roman Empire more often than you’d expect.
67 was another candidate, pronounced six-seven; Slang with vague meanings taken from Skrilla’s song Doot Doot. You might suspect ephemera, but so-called nonsense words like cowabunga or skibidi could serve as membership badges for a generation, with 67 of them winning Dictionary.com’s word of the year award. although not macquarie67 shared the category crown with the epitome of enthusiasm: “he ate (and left no crumbs)”.
As for the Internet, when combined with Technology, the fight for rewards has intensified. If 2020 belonged to COVID, this year is ruled by ChatGPT and all the other “rattles” called AI bots. A. Star Wars the reference made its debut in the clanker video game, as confirmed by Carl Bodnaruk Star Wars: Republic Commando It returned in 2005 and later expanded into the TV series Star Wars: The Clone Wars.
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But was Clanker the point? The sci-fi regiment, a favorite of the voting bloc, looked poised for the year’s crown until scumbags intervened. Artificial intelligence, more precisely, is the clear winner of the Internet category. Defined as “low-quality content generated by generative AI,” slop is our modern-day equivalent of spam. Thorn can easily be packaged with fusions such as sloganeering, slop music and corpslop.
The other heavy hitter, joining the podium with AI slop (gold) and strummer (silver), was medical misogyny: systemic bias against women in medical treatment, even the terminology of the body, as this column explored last month. As for the referendum, the decision was similar; The attention economy scored bronze when putting AI ahead of medical misogyny.
