Merriam-Webster names "slop" the word of the year, and boy was 2025 sloppy

Sometimes, the Merriam-Webster word of the year is predictable. And 2025 was one of those years.

Extremely unsurprisingly, the famous and venerable publisher of dictionaries and other reference materials declared "slop" its word of the year for 2025. According to Merriam-Webster, slop is defined as "digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence," which feels pretty apt if you've been using the internet in the past calendar year.

The internet saw an explosion of slop in 2025. A slop volcano, if you will. On social media apps, music streaming services, video platforms, group chats, The White House X feed, and our inboxes, AI slop feels inescapable.

Slop might have been an easy choice for Merriam-Webster, but that doesn't make it wrong. This year, AI-generated nonsense and deepfakes proliferated across the internet like never before. Short-form video feeds are now full of cute but questionably real animal videos, and Facebook is overflowing with bizarre AI images of amputated soldiers holding signs that say "no one likes me." That last part is true, I've seen a ton of it.

So, why is 2025 the year of slop?

Big tech corporations worked hard to make sure the internet was filled with as much AI content as possible. For the first time, AI video models like Google's Veo 3 and OpenAI's Sora 2 made it possible to create realistic videos almost instantly. While a trained eye can usually spot an AI-generated video, it's getting harder and harder to tell if viral videos are real.

Meta even released its own short-form videos app specifically for watching AI-generated clips, and it wasn't the only big tech company that released an infinite slop machine in 2025. Generative AI has been around for a couple of years now, but 2025 felt like the tipping point, when companies like Google, Microsoft, and Meta decided it needed to be a load-bearing part of their business strategies.

Heck, people are even talking about putting anti-deepfake clauses in their wills now. In 2025, AI went from being a curiosity to being ubiquitous, and "slop" exemplified that trend.

This had far-reaching consequences for internet vernacular, as "slop" became shorthand for anything generic and disposable, regardless of whether or not AI was involved. In the world of video games, for example, "friendslop" became a term for low-stakes cooperative multiplayer games in 2025. For others, the term applies to the latest output from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or any number of low-impact streaming-exclusive shows and movies. It's become synonymous with "content for content's sake," as it were.

Our own digital culture and tech reporters could barely keep up with the slop machine this year. From emotional support kangaroos and bunnies jumping on trampolines to sexual deepfakes and disturbing political memes, slop is everywhere you look. We even made some slop ourselves.

Slop can be harmless fluff, or it can have a darker side, but it's filling up the internet's trough like never before.

So, there's no denying it — 2025 was the year of slop, at least according to the dictionary of record. I can't really say they're wrong.

Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.