This is an All Ears English podcast episode 2563.
Is brain rot taking over the dictionary?
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Lindsay, do you know what the word of the year is?
The word of 2025.
Of 2025.
Well yeah, we've exited 2025 already, but I'm guessing it has something to do with AI and the junk that comes out of AI.
Maybe
That's a very good guess.
And I don't know if you were aware of this, Lindsay.
Maybe you out there were listeners.
I hadn't really thought about how there's a different word of the year for each dictionary.
Like a dictionary chooses the word of the year.
So we are going to share with you the word of the year from three of the different major dictionaries.
But they are all very related and they're all about that sort of AI and brain rot really which interestingly, was last year's word of the word of the year, for I remember, maybe Oxford.
The word of the year was brain rot.
Really?
Oh, my gosh.
It's so interesting.
Okay, so we're going in a direction.
That's for sure.
That's for sure.
This was inspired by a listener question.
Someone sent in a question about it.
And I had just discovered that this was the word of the year for dictionary.com.
Yep.
And I'll go ahead and read the question.
This is from our amazing listener Ruri from Singapore.
They said, Dear Allers English team, can you make an episode regarding this trendy thing?
Some of my schoolmates say it often, but what does it mean actually?
The trendy word is 6-7 or 6-7, just spelled out.
You have to say 6-7.
You can't say 67, right?
No, and you have to have that sing-songy, 6-7, like it's very the sing-songy.
Wow, this is so foreign to me.
I love it.
So guys, we're going to dive into this today.
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We cover words that have been around for centuries and words that just popped up last year, right?
Yes, this is so interesting.
I'm really excited to dive in.
So yes, dictionary.com's word of the year is six, seven, the numbers.
And I remember this being sort of controversial because people were like those are numbers that can't be the word of the year.
I know, right?
Illegal.
Yes.
Yeah.
And I also looked into how they choose the word.
So they choose it based on words that made an impact on our conversations online in the real world.
And they are looking at searches.
They reported that searches of six seven increased six fold in June 2025, which I think it was probably people trying to figure out why kids kept saying six, seven and what this meant and where it came from.
Yeah, yeah, probably.
They're parents, right?
But this is interesting vocabulary.
What does sixfold mean, Lindsay?
Sixfold means something increases by six times, right?
Something becomes six times the number of the original number.
So six times six, 36, right?
Exactly.
Yes.
Right.
So sixfold, that's a lot for it to increase by that much.
And so this, we're going to share how this phrase originated.
The first instance of it was this song, Doot Doot 6-7 by Skrilla is the artist.
Oh, okay.
Interesting.
But it became popular in these video edits that were featuring professional basketball players, especially one who I'm not sure how to pronounce his name, LaMelo Ball, who is 6'7.
That's his height.
Yeah.
2.01 meters tall.
And so this meme...
Something happened where and they would go like this with their hands.
I'd say six, seven like this.
And it became this nonsense thing that didn't really mean anything.
But then it was described as annoying and like a plague, because every time anyone said six seven, kids at first would say six, seven and go like that.
Ah, and it was be.
It's like this brain rot phenomenon where, like digital media that's a poor quality or makes no sense and is just silly kind of, takes over the world all of a sudden.
Okay.
So it's kind of a way that the kids have.
They have a response when they see this slop right, the AI slop, which we'll talk about in a little bit.
Yeah, exactly.
And so this wasn't initially AI, like definitely there have been like AI videos since then.
But initially, not so much, right.
But it's interesting how it really is all related.
It became so prevalent, like I would hear it so often.
But then I just saw an article in The Atlantic, called.
It was it was titled something like six, seven is dead.
Adults killed it.
And I loved it because we killed it very intentionally.
I had conversations with my friends where we were like, we're intentionally going six, seven.
And then the kids are like, no, because, you know, we were too old to say that.
So uncool of your mom saying it.
But so then now it's uncool for kids to say it because the adults took it over.
So how long did that trend?
I mean, what was the shelf life of that trend then?
Aubrey, when did it start?
It was like January of last year.
So we know that it was in June that it really blew up, right?
Okay.
In June of 2025 is when it was like searches increased sixfold.
So right before that was not sure when this doot, doot six, seven game came out, but it was like last month, maybe October of 2025, when I started hearing it everywhere.
Okay.
My kids were saying it all the time.
I would hear it at volleyball.
If the score was six, seven, somebody else would be like six, seven every time.
And then we would just laugh.
It was just like funny, but constantly.
Interesting.
So it maybe had a shelf life of six months, right?
Maybe six months.
Maybe.
And now it's kind of gone.
You don't hear it very often.
If someone says it, somebody else kind of groans now.
Oh, that's good to know.
So the Atlantic is right.
It's dead and adults killed it.
Well, that's good to know.
That's good to know.
I was on a food tour in Rome and there were two young kids that a family had brought mostly adults and then a couple of like teenagers and parents were like, or the other people in the group.
The adults were like.
What does this mean?
And now I realize we were uncool by even asking about that, because they were rolling their eyes at us, because we were asking about what it meant.
That's so funny.
And they're like, that's so six months ago.
Six months ago.
You're so out of date.
Right.
But this is interesting that the other dictionaries chose different words, right?
So Webster's word of the year was slop.
You mentioned this, Lindsay.
This is interesting.
This is digital content that is of low quality.
It is produced usually by AI, right?
And it's obviously AI usually.
And like absurd videos, you know, advertising images that are clearly AI or cheesy fake news.
Maybe it looks real and you click on it and then it's just clickbait.
Yeah.
And I think even beyond that, you know, just there's there's a tone that AI currently has.
This will probably improve.
That when you ask AI a question, or when you ask AI to write you an email or do something for you, it comes up with this bland language.
Unless you train your AI really well, it just feels bleh.
Yes, absolutely.
I love the word slop to describe it.
I'm obsessed.
It's interesting.
I looked up the original meaning of slop.
And in the 1700s, it meant soft mud.
But in the 1800s it came to mean food waste and would be like pig slop was food waste that was fed to pigs.
And then it sort of generally became like rubbish, like garbage or a product that is of low value.
Yeah, that's what I think of when I hear the word slop.
I think of pigs, like what you would feed a pig or would have back in the day.
Yeah, I still grew up saying that.
We had neighbors that had pigs and we would go and feed them the slop.
Nice, yeah.
So now AI is feeding us the slop.
I love it.
So a couple examples of here you might hear it said, my feed is full of AI slop.
You might say, if you start, if you're on TikTok or Facebook or something and you start just seeing these like AI generated articles that seem like they're just clickbait.
And if you do click on them, it's all ads and and might even be like blatantly false or clearly false information.
Yeah, I just try not to click on any of that stuff.
That's a good recommendation.
Every time I clicked on something like that, I regret it.
I'm like, why did I click that?
I should have known better.
Yeah, for sure.
Or here we go.
I almost forwarded an article before realizing it was just AI slop thrown together for clicks.
And this happens, right?
My mother-in-law forwarded all of us the entire family an article that would have been very newsworthy if it were true, but it was kind of tricky.
We're all sort of like, who's going to tell her?
And my husband was just like, oh, it looks like this might not be accurate.
It looks like it might be clickbait.
Oh, my gosh.
I think older people are definitely more susceptible to that.
But now there are even podcasts that are AI slop.
There are podcasts out there that you can find and listen to that are hosted by AI bots.
Which to me is insane.
I mean, that's just my opinion.
No, thank you.
Not interested.
I'm not interested.
And I think even if like an AI voice reading a book, I don't like it.
There are too many strange pronunciation things and it just feels disingenuous.
I don't like it.
Pretty much.
Yeah.
Yep.
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Okay, then what was the Oxford Dictionary's word of the year?
I'm curious.
This one was really interesting.
It was rage bait.
And this is, you know, it's deliberate agitation.
But so this?
The reason this was the word of the year is because there's so much rage bait, online comments, articles that are deliberately annoying someone in order to get clicks and views and comments.
Deliberately annoying someone or provoking them really, right?
Exactly.
So I guess this was first used online in a posting on usernet in 2002 to designate um.
It was about driving, about road rage.
It was designating drivers being flashed by another one and they would call that rage bait.
And now we use it.
I hear it more for online, like you were saying, deliberately provoking someone.
I mean, I think the algorithms are kind of set up this way, right?
To keep us hooked in and clicking through to those articles and sharing and that kind of thing.
Exactly.
Yes.
And this has created a really interesting ethical debate about what's online and should everything be slop and rage bait?
Should we try to make it be more uplifting or interesting, engaging, right?
So this has been interesting to see sort of some of the debates online about how did things get this way and how can we fix it.
Is it even possible?
Probably in 2026 we'll see people starting to move, trying to move away from technology in some way, but then we're so embedded with technology, right?
We need it now.
I'm now seeing ads.
Have you seen these Lindsay ads for apps that are clearly rage bait, where it'll show someone playing the ad or but making obviously bad decisions, with the goal that you'll download the game to prove you can do better?
I have not seen that.
It's terrible.
Creative.
Interesting.
Interesting.
They'll do whatever they can do.
But also terrible.
They'll do whatever they can do to get your clicks, right?
Or signups or downloads or whatever it is.
So we're smarter than that, I think, right?
Yeah.
Let's hope.
We have a couple of examples.
You can see how this would look in a sentence, right?
In a conversation, you might say, oh, don't reply to that post.
It's obviously rage bait meant to get people arguing in the comments.
Yes, I love that one.
Or that headline felt like pure rage bait, right?
Yeah, and that does happen, right?
Often news media outlets will know they'll get more clicks, more attention, more comments if they stir up people's emotions and they're happy to aim for negative emotions.
I mean even you know, because usually how I get my news I just try to go to specific, like websites.
I just go to New York Times, I go to The Economist or The Journal or something, and.
But even the New York Times they do a little bit of this.
They try to be a little bit less sensational, of course, because it's a noteworthy publication.
But you can tell that they'll A-B test titles.
Because you could see an article on Saturday morning, then you go back Saturday night.
The same article has a different title.
Oh, that's interesting.
Makes sense, I guess.
And if it's like a new, people might think it's a new article and click it again.
Sure.
Yeah.
That or they just figured that they were literally testing the click through rates.
This one's doing better.
Leave it out there.
Yeah.
Well, we have a little role play here where we can use these three words of the year all in one little conversation.
Post about banning coffee before work.
Oh, yeah.
I'm pretty sure that's rage bait.
You think so?
Yeah.
It seemed designed to make people angry and boost clicks.
I guess that makes sense.
I feel like I saw six or seven slop articles just today.
Six, seven.
Didn't get the right intonation.
We don't know, but it doesn't even matter anymore.
I've heard it a lot, right?
It's just six, seven.
I
I also have heard it's funny today at volleyball.
I heard early this morning they said 612 and then kind of like a play on where they were like 612.
Interesting.
And because they still had that sing songy and that was kind of clever.
So it's like, yeah.
But do you think that the Gen X generation, the parents of Gen Z, can they ever invent a phrase?
Or is it just the young people that can actually invent a phrase?
I think we could maybe.
It probably wouldn't get picked up as easily or as quickly.
And we wouldn't because we have better things to do with our time.
We do, rather than stand around and figure out a phrase.
Right, exactly.
They're not cool enough, right?
That's true.
Yeah.
There's a cool factor.
There aren't enough other adults that would be into it.
They're all too busy too.
Oh, so funny.
So where did we use our key phrases here?
So you said, I said, did you see that post about banning coffee before work?
And that would create some rage in me for sure.
Yeah, right?
I would maybe click that.
It's like a new law.
You're really hindering on your personal liberties here.
Right.
Right.
And then you said, yeah, I'm pretty sure it's just rage bait.
Exactly.
Meaning it is designed to make people angry to get them to click and comment.
And then what else?
And then you said, I guess that makes sense.
I feel like I saw six or seven slop articles.
And that would mean, like AI generated articles that are either not true or just, you know, intentionally there for click or comments.
And then I said, six, seven.
Yeah, you got the intonation right.
I'm not even close.
I intentionally didn't make you ever have to say it.
I'll have me be the one to say it.
I'll catch on. to the next trend.
I'll get on early.
I'm sure.
Yeah, you don't need to do this one.
It's gone.
It's done.
People are just going to roll their eyes at you if you say six, seven like that.
Now I know why those kids were rolling their eyes on the food tour.
Now I get it.
So funny.
I love it.
We should have recorded this before your food tour and saved you.
Yeah, I really should have.
Really should have.
All right, Aubrey, what's our takeaway for today?
I mean, there are always new trendy words coming up.
Where should we leave our listeners?
Absolutely.
These are all fun, interesting words.
But I think the biggest takeaway is about the discourse surrounding slop online rage bait.
You know how the Internet is changing and what, if anything, we should do about it.
I think it's definitely really good advice to not click those things articles, to be able to start recognizing rage bait or AI generated articles and not looking at them.
Don't just get your news on Facebook.
It's tricky though.
And just having conversations broadly about what are we consuming now?
It's changed a lot even in the last year between January 25 and 24 and 23.
It's like, oh my gosh, things have changed so much.
And so where are we headed, right?
This is a good connection topic to share with a native speaker.
Absolutely.
It would make for really interesting conversations.
I've been having these conversations and it's interesting.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Really good stuff.
All right, Aubrey, we'll see you back on the show very soon.
Thanks for being on the mic with me today.
Awesome.
See you next time.
Bye.
Take care.
Bye.
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