If you are scrolling memes, reels, or social media, it might mean that you are suffering from “brain rot.”
Brain rot has become Oxford's word of the year after its usage increased by 230% from 2023 to 2024. The term describes concern about the impact of spending excessive time on low-quality online content, especially on social media, reported BBC.
Brain rot beat five other shortlisted words, lore, demure, romantasy, slop, and dynamic pricing, to become Oxford’s word of 2024.
Casper Grathwohl, the president of Oxford Languages, the company’s dictionary division, noted that the increasing usage of the word reflects how rapidly social media is changing the language.
He said, “With ‘brain rot’ it’s a phenomenon of young people skewering language trends on TikTok, almost exactly after they themselves have churned out that language.”
Moreover, the word refers to the declining mental abilities and intellectual state of a person because of the overconsumption of trivial or unchallenging content.
Psychologist and Oxford University Professor Andrew Przybylski describes, “There's no evidence of brain rot actually being a thing. Instead, it 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."
The initial traces of the word were found years before the creation of the internet. Henry David Thoreau used the word “potato rot” in his book Walden back in 1854 to criticise how society devalues complex ideas and makes people intellectually challenged.
