According to Oxford University Press, which publishes the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the term ‘brain rot’ is defined as the “supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state” as it relates to overdosing on online content without much of a narrative — like TikTok videos.
Brain rot is also the outfit’s so-called word of the year in 2024, given its rise in popular culture this year. As explains the New York Times, the organization scours a corpus of “some 26 billion words” from news sources across the English-speaking world to identify the “moods and conversations that have shaped 2024.”
Note that brain rot doesn’t appear in the OED. Neither does ‘rizz’ or ‘goblin mode,’ which won as word of the year in 2023 and 2022, respectively. Seemingly, despite their recognition by the Oxford University Press (the publishing house of the University of Oxford), they haven’t yet shown the sustained and widespread usage that OED editors want to see first.
They may have a long wait. Among the OED’s newest additions is ‘tech-savvy,’ whose earliest known use was in the 1980s.