Merriam-Webster just added 1,400 words and definitions to its dictionary, and the batch leans heavily on internet culture, AI jargon, and social-media slang that says more about the digital age than the English language.
The dictionary publisher announced the update on its website this week, calling the new entries a reflection of "words and meanings that have demonstrated widespread use over time, offering a window into the world today." Among the additions: "looksmaxxing," "cuffing season," "uncanny valley," "meme coin," "parasocial," "vibe coding," "shapewear," "compute," and "superfood."
That window, if you take the list at face value, opens onto a culture increasingly shaped by screens, algorithms, and fleeting online trends. Whether that amounts to genuine linguistic evolution or the slow erosion of a shared vocabulary is a question Merriam-Webster does not appear eager to answer.
Some of the new definitions are straightforward enough. "Superfood," per Merriam-Webster, means "food rich in nutrients, including salmon, broccoli and blueberries." Fair enough, the word has been on grocery-store packaging for years. "Cuffing season" now officially means "a time of the year when people who are not married or in a relationship begin looking for a short-term romantic partner to spend the colder months of the year with." That one may raise eyebrows among readers who remember when courtship was not treated as a seasonal hobby.
Then there is "uncanny valley," defined as "that creepy feeling that results from something artificial appearing almost, but not quite, human." Merriam-Webster's timing is notable. The term has circulated in tech and design circles for decades, but its formal inclusion arrives as public anxiety about artificial intelligence continues to grow.
The AI thread runs deeper. Merriam-Webster's 2025 Word of the Year was "slop", defined as "digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence." Now the dictionary is adding "vibe coding" and "compute" in contexts tied to the same technology. The company has not yet announced its 2026 Word of the Year, though that pick typically comes in the final quarter.
The New York Post reported that the update also includes "Sunday scaries," "Rickroll," "California sober," "Mandela Effect," and "glow-up", terms drawn almost entirely from social media and online culture. The publisher maintains nearly 17 million citations on file to support its editorial research into which words have earned a permanent spot.
Merriam-Webster describes its process as evidence-driven, not political. A statement on the company's website reads:
"The definer must judge whether there is enough evidence to put a new word in; that judgment will be reviewed by more senior colleagues as the dictionary moves through the editorial process, but there's no committee, no advocacy, no meetings for new word inclusion."
The company says words must demonstrate frequent, widespread, and meaningful use before they qualify. That standard sounds rigorous on paper. But when the result is a batch dominated by TikTok slang and internet shorthand, it is worth asking how much weight "meaningful" carries in the equation.
Social-media users noticed the tension. One Instagram commenter, quoted in the New York Post's coverage, asked: "How did it take Rickroll 20 years to make it in, but looksmaxxing is already there?" Another suggested a waiting period: "There needs to be a multi-step process to becoming an official word or phrase. They start as farm league words until they've been in use for x-amount of years."
Those are reasonable objections. "Rickroll", an internet prank dating to the mid-2000s, has been part of online life for two decades. "Looksmaxxing," a term from niche online fitness and appearance communities, is far newer and far narrower in its reach. If both cleared the bar in the same update, the bar may be lower than Merriam-Webster lets on.
Dictionaries have always absorbed new words. That is how living languages work. But the pace and character of the additions say something about the culture producing them. A generation ago, new dictionary entries tended to reflect advances in science, shifts in law, or changes in how Americans worked and lived. Today's batch is heavy on parasocial relationships, crypto speculation, and seasonal dating strategies.
The term "parasocial", describing the one-sided emotional bond a viewer or follower feels toward a public figure, is a useful addition. It names something real and increasingly common. But its inclusion alongside "meme coin" and "cuffing season" paints a picture of a culture that spends more time online than it does in the physical world where consequences land.
That disconnect shows up across American public life. Political leaders increasingly speak in the language of social media, chasing viral moments over policy substance. Both parties have struggled to connect with voters who feel the country's institutions, from Congress to corporate boardrooms to, yes, dictionary publishers, are more interested in staying current than staying serious. Democrats in particular have tried to rebrand around cultural trends rather than address the bread-and-butter concerns that matter to working families.
None of this is Merriam-Webster's fault, exactly. A dictionary records usage; it does not set it. But the company's framing, calling the update "a window into the world today", invites the obvious follow-up: what does that window show?
It shows a world where a made-up crypto term can earn the same institutional stamp as a word with centuries of use. Where the feelings people develop toward strangers on screens now have a formal dictionary entry. Where the anxiety produced by artificial intelligence has become common enough to name, even as the same technology floods the internet with the low-quality "slop" Merriam-Webster flagged just last year.
Political identity itself has become a lifestyle category in this environment. When public figures treat personal preferences, from whom they would date to how they brand their public image, as political statements, the line between culture and politics dissolves. The dictionary is just catching up to a shift that has been underway for years.
And when politicians reverse their positions under pressure, the vocabulary of the moment matters less than whether leaders mean what they say, a standard no dictionary update can fix.
Merriam-Webster is not wrong that language evolves. It does. And a dictionary that refused to acknowledge new words would quickly become irrelevant. The question is not whether "uncanny valley" or "superfood" belong in the book. They probably do.
The question is whether a culture that generates 1,400 dictionary-worthy new terms, most of them rooted in internet subcultures, AI anxiety, and disposable online trends, is producing the kind of language that will still mean something in ten years. Merriam-Webster's own 17-million-citation archive suggests the company takes longevity seriously. But the speed at which niche internet slang now clears the threshold suggests the standard is bending.
For now, the update is what it is: a snapshot of a country that spends a lot of time online and is not entirely comfortable with what it finds there. "Uncanny valley" may be the most honest addition in the batch, a formal name for the uneasy feeling that something looks almost right but is not.
That feeling extends well beyond robots and AI-generated faces. It describes a growing share of American public life, institutions that look functional but are not, leaders who sound serious but are not, and a culture that keeps adding new words for things it has not figured out how to fix.
