Chairs of the 2024 ADS WOTY nominating session, l to r, Kelly Elizabeth Wright, Charles Carson, and Ben Zimmer
The American Dialect Society has selected rawdog as its 2024 Word of the Year (WOTY 2024). Rawdog is an excellent choice for a number of reasons. The word dates to at least 2002—to be considered, words need only to be newly prominent, not newly coined, in the year in question—with an original sense of to have unprotected sex. In recent years, rawdog has semantically broadened, coming to mean to engage in any activity recklessly or without protection, such as braving Covid without a mask or vaccine or cooking an unfamiliar meal without a recipe. One can rawdog a long aircraft flight by boarding without reading material or a movie. In fact, there is even a game where users compete as to who can rawdog the longest on a flight that uses an app on the player’s phone to measure eye movement, penalizing them if they don’t stare straight ahead.
Many organizations and individuals (including me) promote a word or words or the year, but the ADS is the oldest, having done so for some thirty-five years. The ADS is a 135-year-old professional organization made up of linguists, lexicographers, and others that studies the languages of North America. It has published the journal American Speech for the last hundred years.
Each year in early January, the organization meets, in recent years in conjunction with the larger Linguistic Society of America. The primary purpose of the meeting is an academic conference where members present papers and further the scholarly aims of the society. In contrast, the WOTY selection is a fun diversion and an opportunity to raise public awareness about language change. In short, while the selection itself is unserious (a word that itself was one of this year’s nominees), the process can be enlightening.
I’ve been following and writing about the ADS WOTY for over two decades, and on occasion I’ve participated in the proceedings, as I did this year. (I usually show up if I’m also giving a paper at the conference, as I did this year.) You can read ADS press release which provides the list of winners, nominees, and vote count by clicking this link. But here I’m going to discuss my impressions of the process and the selections.
The selection occurs in two steps. The first is a nominating session, held the day before the final selection where nominations for words in the subcategories are made. Some subcategories, like Most Useful and Political Word of the Year are perennial, and ad hoc subcategories can be proposed if appropriate for that particular year. I proposed a category that seemed fitting for several of the words this year, Most Fun While It Lasted, although someone else came up with that most apropos wording for the title. In my opinion, this is the more fun and interesting session. It’s smaller (there were about fifty people there), and as a result the discussion is livelier, more in depth, and a bit more scholarly inclined (but still fun and unserious; to give a sense of the tone, co-chair Kelly Elizabeth Wright was dubbed the nominatrix). More importantly, terms used by more marginal and underrepresented groups are more likely to be raised and discussed in depth in this session.
The final selection is made the next night. That session is much larger; some 350 were in attendance this year. Nominees in the subcategories are voted on, and nominees are made for the WOTY itself and then voted upon. If no nominee gets fifty percent of the vote on the first ballot, a runoff between the top two vote-getters is held. Because the crowd is much larger and there are time constraints (another unrelated conference session uses the big room immediately after), the discussion is more constrained. It’s still fun, though. There is a tradition of running satirical commentary in the visual presentation of the nominees, this year by Jessica Grieser, filling in for Grant Barrett who usually provides the snark. (As an example, when co-chair Ben Zimmer’s son stood up to comment on the combining form -maxxing, Jessica typed Zimmermaxxing into the display.)
Now on to what I think of the nominees and final selections.
For the big one, the overall WOTY, rawdog won in a runoff against sanewashing. Despite requiring a runoff, the choice was not that close. Rawdog nearly got fifty percent on the first ballot, with the other nominees splitting the rest of the vote. I think it is an excellent choice. It is newly prominent, encapsulates a trending social phenomenon, and is linguistically interesting.
Lock in took top honors in the Most Useful category, another excellent choice. To lock in is to achieve a state of deep focus and concentration, and one can see it being used for many years hence. Other nominees included cooked, to be exhausted or in serious trouble. While it is currently in newly prominent slang use, this sense has been in common and continuous use since the mid nineteenth century, calling into question its qualification. Crash out is a noun and verb referring to having reached one’s limit or as a result reacting in an irrational or overly emotional manner. Both cooked and crash out were also nominated for the overall WOTY. The final nominee in this category is eat, in the sense of accomplishing something extremely well, with a superlative of devour, and a past tense of 4+4 (ate), displaying linguistic inventiveness. The nominees were all good, but I agree that lock in best fits the spirit of the category.
Unserious won the Most Likely to Succeed category. While the word dates to the seventeenth century, its use as a putdown is relatively new. It is a reasonable choice, but I don’t think it was the best. That was NIL, a legal initialism arising out the court cases requiring the NCAA to compensate college athletes for use of their name, image, or likeness. Not only is the term new, but it will undoubtedly be used in legal discourse for ages to come. The other nominees were less appropriate for the category. Aura, a charismatic presence, is an already well-established word that has recently gained increased currency in youth slang. Girlypop, a fun, trusted, and distinctly feminine female friend (also an adjective describing one) was a new one to me, and while it may last, its chances are distinctly less than either NIL or unserious. Finally, there was tariffied, that is being afraid or worried over the economic consequences of Donald Trump’s proposed tariffs on imported goods. While it is a clever coinage, there is no way it will outlast the incoming administration (and probably not even that long), making it distinctly inappropriate for this category.
ADS’s Political WOTY is Luigi, a reference to Luigi Mangione, who in December assassinated UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. While it is a productive root, acting as noun and verb and in numerous compounds, it suffers from the end-of-year bias that is present in most WOTY discussions. I was pulling for broligarchy , which I thought had more staying power throughout the year and has a better chance of remaining in use. Sanewashing and weird were also nominees that were deserving of winning. Sanewashing was also a nominee for overall WOTY. Honorable mention goes to bleach blonde bad built butch body, a retort delivered by Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) in a House of Representatives committee meeting after Greene insulted her appearance. While the exact term is very much of a particular moment, it is representative of a type of insult discourse that is common among Black women, a group that is often left out of WOTY consideration. Burrito taxi, a mocking of complaints about inflation of grocery prices by people who order meal delivery to their homes, and lib out, the unrealistic hopes of Democratic victory in the year’s elections, were also nominated.
Brainrot, mental deterioration from consuming too much social media or that media itself, took honors for Digital WOTY. It’s a good choice, but I preferred AI slop (or just slop) referring to computer-generated content, especially the flood of such content that fills Google search results. It’s new this year, and we’re going to be contending with AI slop for many years to come. Xit/Xodus was another reasonable choice, referring to users abandoning Twitter/X en masse, but that’s another term of the moment that will not have longevity. Cope, a nouning of the verb coined in response to the prospects of the deteriorating of American politics as nominated, as was tradwife, a social media phenomenon, and an ironic one at that as being a social media influencer is hardly traditional.
The Informal WOTY was rawdog, winning handily, although there was a strong showing by yap, referring to excessive or overly enthusiastic speech, used both negatively and positively. While the negative use is hardly newly prominent, the positive use is, and in 2024 it was very common among youth, making it a reasonable nominee. Yap was also a nominee for overall WOTY. Cooked was also a nominee. The other three, mewing, mog, and W, were all new to me and deservedly trailed in the voting.
Most Creative honors deservedly went to the snowclone the X I Xed, where one invents an irregular past tense of a regular verb, as in the gasp I gusped or the scream I scrempt. The combining form -maxxing took a distant second. I have a certain fondness for the nominee in da clerb, we all fam, a quotation from the television sitcom Broad City, which became a TikTok trend in 2024. I like it, but it’s not as apt a choice as the X I Xed. And broligarchy was also in the mix but didn’t get much traction in this category’s votes.
Finally there was the ad hoc category of Most Fun While It Lasted, which I proposed mainly because of brat, which took the category handily. Demure, a new sense referring to modest and reserved appearance, hawk tuah, an echoic term for spitting, especially before performing oral sex, that was inspired by a viral video, and hold space, the nonjudgmental creation of a safe space were nominees that didn’t stand a chance against brat, which was also a nominee for overall WOTY.
That was this year’s crop of WOTY winners and nominees. Overall, it was a pretty good grouping of terms of significance in the past year. Of course one can disagree with any of the choices or my opinions about them; there’s nothing scientific or academically rigorous about the process. But it is an entertaining exercise that makes one think about the events of the past year and the language we used to refer to them.
Photo credit: Dave Wilton, 2025. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
