One of the things I like about year-ends is all the best-of-the-year ratings for things like literature, music, and film to enjoy during the holidays. But my top favs are the words of the year lists. There are quite a few—most of the big dictionaries put out a version. But I decided to run with the Oxford English Dictionary’s selection. It is the Oxford Dictionary, after all. The granddaddy of all dictionaries. Well, and the fact that I’m a Brit and conditioned to know it’s the best one.
Seriously, I find it interesting how words and language shift every year. It’s great to see the dynamism of a living language that welcomes new words, different constructs, or reimagined meanings of existing words. This endless and ongoing innovation breathes life into old favourites low on oxygen and seemingly beyond their use-by date. Some of these innovations have great merit; they offer genius new ways of expressing ourselves in the now and have staying power. Others are flashes in the chronology pan—a blip on our verbal horizons like a one-hit musical wonder.
A brief digression
Having mentioned “one-hit wonders” I felt duty bound to come up with at least one. It’s not for nothing the title of my next book includes “Rabbit Holes”—how I love plunging into them. This particular rabbit hole produced forgotten treasures like Gimme Dat Ding.

Gimme Dat Ding is a 1970 musical monstrosity of monumental proportions, brought to the world by otherwise (seemingly) sensible musicians, The Pipkins. It was hugely popular and climbed to #9 on the US charts, #7 in Canada, #6 in the UK, and #61 in Australia, so what do I know? It wouldn’t be polite or correct to conclude anything about the respective national psyches from this small sample. Suffice it to say, Australia earns my Emperor’s New Clothes Award for not getting suckered. Charting at 61 is still a lot of sales, though. Apologies to anyone who was a fan back in the day.
My question, after The Chicken Dance, is Gimme Dat Ding the most annoying single ever produced? It’s up there for me. What would you nominate? As I’m a considerate type, if you want to eliminate the earworm I’ve jundoubtedly ust given you, check out one of my December posts—The Christmas Earworm Awards—and you’ll quickly find a replacement.
Back to the serious business of Word of the Year lists …
Oxford Dictionary’s winner is … drum roll … Brain Rot
Brain Rot is the winner based on the current meaning: mental deterioration due to overconsumption of online content. As The Times article covering the OxDics (thank you, thank you for appreciating my inspiring contribution to expanding the vocabulary) word picks noted, the term “brain rot” isn’t new.
In 1854, Henry David Thoreau wrote, “While England endeavours to cure the potato rot, will not any endeavour to cure the brain rot?” Thoreau’s context was “society’s parlous tendency to disparage complex ideas in favour of simpler ones.” I’m picking that would be “dumbing down” to us.
Usage of “brain rot” in its current incarnation increased by 230 per cent during 2024, so it’s clearly a thing and deserving it’s primacy.
And the OxDic’s 2024 Runners up…
Dynamic Pricing—that is, price variation reflecting demand. This cheeky little number edged into the winner’s enclosure for events like the Oasis reunion. In my country of residence, our national airline’s popularity went into a tailspin when it introduced this new form of unfairness to its pricing model. Good for the early bird buyers, but rubbish for people who might have to buy an airline ticket at the last minute to get to their much loved Great Aunt Maud’s funeral on the other side of the world.
Demure. This somewhat dated word made a mid-year comeback on TikTok as “very demure.” It used to mean modesty, particularly regarding sartorial choices—high necklines, low hemlines, etc. However, it’s morphed to mean a form of reserved behaviour, such as being respectful in the workplace. (I featured “demure” in another 2024 blog. Brattish or Demure?)
Slop. Once upon a time, slop was nasty stuff like wastewater from a kitchen—sink slops—bathroom—water slopped over the edge of the bath—or, earlier, the contents of a chamber pot that had to be emptied by hand. In some countries, people might slop around on weekends in track pants. The new usage refers to low-quality AI-generated content. In my book, it’s the perfect word hijack. Slop is expressionism in a sludge bucket. So easy to picture.
Lore was once mythical storytelling. In 2024 vernacular, lore is background information about someone or something. I sort of like that. Note to self: talk about “lore” in my brand development wor, rather than “origin stories”—so last decade.
Romantasy completed the shortlist. It’s not hard to fathom this one; it’s simply the self-explanatory new literary category that mashes up romance and fantasy. I’ve even read (and embarrassingly) enjoyed a couple.
My top three Words of the Year in 2024
Where is “word salad” in the Word of the Year Awards? It was AWOL in all the lists I found. No red-carpet moments for this elegant combo. Yet it was suddenly everywhere, all at once, even if it wasn’t everything to everybody.
German and French psychiatrists introduced word salad to describe the nonsensical syntax of the mentally ill. During 2024, it was hijacked to the point of overuse by political commentators at a loss for other ways of describing the oratory skills of some leading political figures.
If you wonder why I keep repeating “word of the year”, I’ve read that liberalling sprinkling a post’s “focus keyword” throughout pleases the search engine gods. It’s known as “keyword stuffing”, which is my second choice because I’ve become a slave to it. As Jordana Weiss puts it, “To catch the attention of readers (and more likely, the elusive Google Algorithm), writers are stuffing so many keywords into their titles that they’ve become the written equivalent of word salad.” I had to throw that in because it captures two of my top expressions in one sentence.
My number three word of the year combo is“Hive Mind.” The tendency to adopt the beliefs and opinions of one’s community. Initially about creatures like bees and ants—Merrriam-Webster (stepping away from OxDic) defines it as the collective thoughts, ideas, and opinions of a group of people (such as Internet users) regarded as functioning together as a single mind.
Hive Mind is the antonym of collective intelligence, allowing flow for ideas’ development. Hive Mind shuts them down. It’s a fixed, rigid structure, and although the residents of the Hive help each other and share opinions on decisions, it doesn’t allow for the growth of new ideas.
What are your top picks for words of 2024?
Keeping the language dynamic
I have some issues about how words evolve. Take premises. Used to be a perfectly good plural noun. As in business premises—the place your business operates from and people work within. A dying flame you’d have to say as people more and more refer to their “business premise”, stealing the thunder of “premise’ meaning an hypothesis or the basis of an argument.
However, mostly I embrace the creativity involved in adding and adapting words. It’s entertaining and our language is much richer for it. Whether these words of the year endure is immaterial. They afford us relevance and nuance—a contemporary vernacular that provides insight into the prevailing zeitgeist. Word innovation keeps our language vibrant, evolving, and engaging.
William Shakespeare used over 20,000 words in his plays and poems, and his works represent the first recorded use of more than 1,700 words in the English language. He may have invented or introduced many of these, often by combining words, transforming nouns into verbs, adding prefixes or suffixes, and so on. Some remained in use while others did not, but he employed them to enhance audience understanding. Shakespeare’s original words included bedroom, downstairs, eyeball, fashionable, gossip, kissing, nervy, puppy dog, questioning, worthless, yelping, and zany. So why would I complain about “premise”, “medaled” and “podiumed”?
The Second Edition of the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary (March 1989) contains full entries for 171,476 words in current use and 47,156 obsolete words. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged, and its 1993 Addenda Section include some 470,000 entries. Wow, on either count, that’s a lot of words to play with.
Forget the word salad, step away from the brain rot, get creative
“There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic.”
Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale
As an author and blogger, I adore having a language imbued with such remarkable depth of invention and reinvention to draw upon as my mother tongue. Nowadays, we also use emojis and emoticons to illuminate our texts. It’s a bit like attention-challenged versions of Medieval monks elevating the manuscripts they laboured over. Emojis convey emotions and moods in an instant. They are the perfect answer to communicating in this “time-poor” time. However, for all their usefulness and ubiquity, they’re not a patch on actual words and the ability to string them together to fire people’s imaginations and pique their curiosity. Words offer multiple dimensions. Emojis are flat and one-dimensional, however useful that smiley or sad face is at times.
To finish—to have the last word, if you will—coming back to the New Year, I like to set goals for the year, which I see as resolutions-adjacent. Oops, there we go again, another word of the year in 2024. Everything is now something-adjacent, particularly my blog posts, inspired by captivating ideas I’ve read and encountered.