The phrase “brain rot” spiked 230 percent from 2023 to 2024, according to the makers of the Oxford English Dictionary

Many of us have felt it, and now it’s official: “brain rot” is the Oxford dictionaries’ word of the year. Oxford University Press said Monday that the

The first recorded use of “brain rot,” according to Oxford University Press, was in Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, published in 1854. “While England endeavours to cure the potato-rot, will not any endeavour to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally?” wrote Thoreau in his treatise on transcendentalism.