The timing feels significant. "Slop" emerged as shorthand for AI-generated garbage, but it's already being stretched to cover any output someone doesn't like. I've seen it applied to legitimate content that just happened to be formatted cleanly or use common phrasing.

The interesting thing is slop predates AI - there was always plenty of low-effort human-generated content farming for clicks or SEO. The word just gave us a convenient label for something we couldn't quite articulate before.

What changes is volume. When producing mediocre content costs almost nothing, the noise floor rises for everyone. The word of the year isn't really about AI - it's about our collective anxiety over signal-to-noise ratios.

This one is an apt pick. I only worry it’s early and the true wave of slop is not yet upon us.

I'd like to see an examination of how the phrase 'human slop' rose and fell in this year. Initially emerging as a counterpoint, it's now receded.

Some other WOTY selections:

Oxford 'rage bait' https://corp.oup.com/news/the-oxford-word-of-the-year-2025-i...

Collins 'vibe coding' https://blog.collinsdictionary.com/language-lovers/collins-w...

Cambridge 'parasocial' https://dictionaryblog.cambridge.org/2025/11/18/cambridge-di...

Dictionary.com '67' https://www.dictionary.com/e/word-of-the-year-2025/

I've noticed amoung colleagues who are not fond of ai usage they love to call out "slop". If a line of code is too verbose or too succinct it must be ai. If a routine doesn't use the function they created when it's something tangentially related it must be ai slop. It's like the new form of gatekeeping.