This Is the 2024 Word of the Year, According to Oxford University Press. What Does It Say About Our Relationship to Technology?

The term “brain rot” captures technology’s hold over people—and their time. My Stockers/Shutterstock

Most of us know the experience: You stir and try to shake off a lethargy that has encased you like an iron blanket. Your eyes feel blurry and unfocused, and so does your brain. Time has slipped away, and you didn’t even notice. The past two hours evaporated in a mist that you don’t quite remember, other than that you watched dozens of mildly funny, largely banal, occasionally bizarre videos on TikTok or YouTube. You feel that all you’ve really managed to do is shave off a few points from your IQ.

There’s a term for this phenomenon. The Oxford University Press, which assembles the Oxford English Dictionary, chose it as the 2024 Word of the Year: “brain rot.”

The dictionary defines the term this way: “Supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as a result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging. Also: something characterized as likely to lead to such deterioration.”

The term “brain rot” encapsulates our troubled relationship with technology and social media, particularly its capacity to addict us, waste our time, and form bad mental habits. The president of Oxford Languages, Casper Grathwohl, said in a statement: “‘Brain rot’ speaks to one of the perceived dangers of virtual life, and how we are using our free time. It feels like a rightful next chapter in the cultural conversation about humanity and technology.”

The Selection Process

The selection of the word of the year offers an opportunity to comment on emerging trends and growing issues in society and spark conversation. Grathwohl told The New York Times: “Choosing the word of the year is a bit of a dark art. The most successful ones are the ones that are slightly counterintuitive and make people think.”

To arrive at the word of the year, Oxford University Press language experts used language data to identify six words that conveyed the mood and conversations of 2024. They then held a public vote involving more than 37,000 people and arrived at “brain rot” as the winner.

The term gained prominence over the past 12 months, increasing in frequency of usage by 230 percent between 2023 and 2024. People increasingly used it to refer to the effect of ingesting large amounts of low-quality online content, often via social media.

Although the term’s application to our digital binging habits may be new, the term itself is not. According to the statement, “brain rot” was first used in 1854 by Henry David Thoreau in “Walden.” Thoreau criticized the shallowness of society in his own day, asserting that its preference was for simplistic explanations rather than complex ideas. He identified the intellectual laziness he saw around him, writing, “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?” What would Thoreau say today?

Or modern world is heavily influenced by internet trends. Grathwohl noted that major linguistic trends are increasingly shaped and informed by internet culture and the advance of technology. Last year’s winning word, “rizz,” like “brain rot,” was popularized online. Some other words that made the shortlist were “demure,” which exploded after influencer Jools Lebron used it in a TikTok video, and “slop,” a term referring to “art, writing, or other content generated using artificial intelligence, shared and distributed online in an indiscriminate or intrusive way, and characterized as being of low quality, inauthentic, or inaccurate.”

Clearly, society has been increasingly shaped by the internet and related technologies such as artificial intelligence. But words such as “brain rot” and “slop” show that we’re increasingly aware of and concerned about how technology is forming our culture. Psychologist Andrew Przybylski told BBC News that the 2024 word of the year “describes our dissatisfaction with the online world, and it’s a word that we can use to bundle our anxieties that we have around social media.”

Maybe we’re right to be concerned. At no other time in human history has content—whether visual, auditory, written, or otherwise—been produced and distributed on such a massive scale and at such breathtaking speed as it is today. TV, media, and the internet function like fire hoses of indiscriminate information, soaking the mind with “stuff,” some of it useful, some profound, but a lot of it useless, hyperbolic, unnecessary, false, and just plain degrading.

Cultivating Wisdom

What risks getting lost in the glut of content we’re perpetually plastered with? Wisdom. Wisdom is born of meditation and contemplation on truth, and this takes time. It doesn’t happen quickly; it occurs over many years, sometimes centuries, like the slow growth of an oak tree. The fast-paced stream of entertainment and opinions bounces around in our brains and triggers unreflective, knee-jerk reactions. It has a tendency to drive out deep thought—as though truth could be gleaned from reading and re-posting a few wild claims and ad hominem attacks on social media platform X.

Even before the rise of the internet, Mortimer Adler and Charles van Doren warned of the dangers of too much information. In “How to Read a Book,” they observed:

“It may be seriously questioned whether the advent of modern communications media has much enhanced our understanding of the world in which we live. Perhaps we know more about the world than we used to, and insofar as knowledge is prerequisite to understanding, that is all to the good. But knowledge is not as much a prerequisite to understanding as is commonly supposed. ... Too many facts are often as much of an obstacle to understanding as too few. There is a sense in which we moderns are inundated with facts to the detriment of understanding.”

We risk the loss of understanding and wisdom in the sea of available content. Every culture needs wisdom in order to survive and thrive. I propose that brain rot poses a threat to more than just our productivity. It might ultimately pose a threat to our culture as a whole by initiating a more widespread “civilizational rot”—the disappearance of thoughtful discourse and the patience needed for the slow growth of wisdom.