Merriam-Webster has officially crowned ‘slop’ as the 2025 Word of the Year. The term, which originally referred to soft mud or pig food, has evolved to describe the flood of low-quality digital content produced by artificial intelligence.

“Like slime, sludge, and muck, slop has the wet sound of something you don’t want to touch. Slop oozes into everything,” the dictionary writes, adding that, in an age of AI anxiety, it is a term designed to communicate “a tone that’s less fearful, more mocking” of the technology.