“Brain rot” takes 2024 crown

Social media, online content, Gen Z and Gen Alpha all had a part to play in determining the Oxford Word of the Year 2024: brain rot.

Brain rot is described as mental deterioration as a consequence of consuming too much online content and media that is seen as superficial or simplistic.

The Oxford University Press uses lexicographers —people who author dictionaries — to track which words or phrases were most used and that most reflect the last 12 months. Brain rot’s usage increased by 230% from 2023 to 2024, largely due to social media platforms, such as TikTok and Instagram.

Sarah Gordon is a French professor within the linguistics department at the College of Humanities and Social Sciences. She has degrees in comparative and European literature, a PhD in French language and literature and several publications related to food, medicine and culture.

“In medieval England, ‘rot’ could refer to really unpleasant things like spoiled or moldy food and decomposing wood, or could be a medical diagnosis for diseases like wasting disease or infected wounds,” Gordon said. “In early modern times, it came to also mean morally corrupt in addition to bad smells or rotting flesh.”

The word brain rot was first recorded by Henry David Thoreau in his book “Walden,” which was published in 1854. Thoreau used the word to describe how society was repelling complex ideas and purposefully nulling intellectual and mental activity. The word has new meaning due to the modern online reality, but the idea remains similar.

“The image of the rotting brain has been popularized through pop culture like zombie movies. Because the word rot can refer to physical or moral things, it makes it ideal for today’s phenomenon of brain rot, in which we might feel like our minds are slowly decaying from lack of exercising our minds,” Gordon said.

Gordon advised students to battle brain rot by engaging in intellectual activity, such as reading or talking about literature, attending class frequently and reading news publications.

“​​We might feel like our minds are slowly decaying from lack of exercising our minds — which we can do by reading newspaper articles like this one,” Gordon said.

Jordan Forest is a recent adjunct instructor within the USU Department of English and specializes in creative writing. She is familiar with the term brain rot from being a recent college student herself and having witnessed it being used around her and online.

“I think I use it to poke fun at myself or at others, sometimes making fun of being online. But also, like I was saying, I don’t have social media, so I’ve had people make fun of me being like ‘You have negative brain rot’ or ‘You don’t have brain rot like us,’” Forest said.

Forest said brain rot’s selection as the word of the year was not all that surprising, as there are two realities: the physical and the online.

“I also think being chronically online and the way that we interact with the internet these days, especially in a post-COVID world where more is online, it makes a lot of sense,” Forest said.

Brain rot influences the college experience as well. Forest said brain rot relates to burnout in several ways, as burnout is the reduction of activity or complete mental and physical collapse due to overworking and intense amounts of stress.

“I think there’s a lot of burnout right now in a lot of different forms,” Forest said. “I just think generally, the feeling of last semester especially was just a lot of burnout, and so that captures the essence of our feeling on campus. So for college students, I think it resonates because that’s pretty much how everyone’s been feeling.”

Casper Grathwohl is the president of Oxford Languages and spoke about the influence and impact that online content has had on Gen Z, a generation that influences the college community.

“These communities have amplified the expression through social media channels, the very place said to cause brain rot,” Grathwohl said. “It demonstrates a somewhat cheeky self-awareness in the younger generations about the harmful impact of social media that they’ve inherited.”

Over 37,000 votes and data analysis led to the chosen word of the year — a word that reflects the cultural significance and impact that online content had on mental health in 2024.