In a dimly lit room, Elliot Cox, a 23-year-old actor and content creator, filmed himself breaking into song on TikTok. His video quickly went viral, amassing over 750,000 views in less than 24 hours.
“Sigmas in the backyard asking where the gyatts are, rizzing up my mates,” he sings while playing the tune of Lana Del Rey’s “Video Games,” which he has renamed “Video Goons” on the piano. “Been edging for a year, I’ve edged myself to tears, I need a grimace shake. Dropping skibidi rizz, hope the betas see this, they bout to get mogged now.”
If you’re having trouble understanding the lyrics, you might not speak brain rot.
Over the past few months, the term brain rot has evolved from a basic synonym for being chronically online to a fully-fledged meme and ironic slang language, like Pig Latin for people who spend too much time on their phones.
Words like gooning, rizz, sigma, gyatt, and skibidi have formed a new cultural lexicon that’s shooting content creators to popularity and permanently warping online and offline speech, according to etymologists. On Friday, Collins Dictionary announced “brain rot” was on shortlisted as the 2024 word of the year.
The term has been used since as early as 2007 to describe the mental state of those who are considered too online. The release of the 2011 video game “The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim,” in which brain rot is a contractible disease, furthered the popularity. As social media blossomed, brain rot also transformed into a noun, referring to low-quality, absurdist, or attention-grabbing content filled with internet references.
“It emerged from reacting to people who are chronically online,” said Adam Aleksic, a Harvard linguistics grad known as @etymologynerd online. “Then it extended to dank memes, and that got extended to TikTok. The idea is that the internet is rotting your brain.”
The explosion of short-form, retention-edited videos created a glut of brain-rotted content in every genre, experts said. There’s political brain rot, sports brain rot, and even skincare brain rot.
Annie Rauwerda, the founder of Depths of Wikipedia, a network of social media accounts that amplify obscure Wikipedia entries, said that the growing popularity of brain rot parallels a broader shift toward more coded language online. She pointed to the rise of so-called “algospeak” or “how people say ‘let’s go Brandon’ to mean they’re a Trump supporter or how ‘watermelons’ mean Palestine,” she said.
The most pervasive form of brain rot content is currently associated with Gen Z and Gen Alpha online culture. These videos and memes pack dozens, and in some cases hundreds, of internet terms, gaming slang words, influencer names, and other online references into a single piece of content.
Lindsay Bowen, a 24-year-old barista and recent college graduate who says she suffers from “severe brain rot,” described it as “a language Gen Alpha and Gen Z speak that the boomer generation doesn’t understand.”
Harley Cenedella, a 21-year-old student in New York, said that speaking in fluent brain rot requires “distorting everything as much as possible through the lens of the internet. There’s an element of making everything embarrassing a little bit and incorporating cringe.”
Many young people who create this kind of content consider it an ironic commentary about the state of technology and the media landscape. Mir Raza, a 27-year-old law clerk in Los Angeles, said that posting long brain rot phrases or content is “a new form of shitposting.”
“It’s an amalgamation of a bunch of trendy slang words and jokes that are just kind of mashed up together,” he said.
Teenagers have always had slang words, but brain rot content is a specific genre that has exploded in recent months, said Don Caldwell, editor-in-chief of Know Your Meme, a platform that catalogs memes and online culture. He said that brain rot content in its current form is part of a phenomenon called slang overload.
“It becomes kind of a game to see how many references or slang terms you can fit into a sentence in a silly way,” he said.
Caldwell explained that brain rot was originally birthed out of older generations of internet users judging younger generations’ slang and the media they consume online, such as the YouTube video series Skibidi Toilet, an animated series where toilets with men’s heads popping out battle tall men with CCTV cameras for heads.
“If brain rot is a religion, Skibidi Toilet is Jesus,” said Bryce Cohen, a 3D animator in Los Angeles who creates brain rot content.
“Originally, the idea of brain rot was that people’s intellect deteriorated if they were exposed to certain content online,” Caldwell said. “Brain rot was a joke disease for people consuming too much algorithmically optimized content that’s been formed by what succeeds on places like TikTok.”
A 21-year-old content creator who goes by the name Cherriems creates brain rot content on TikTok and Instagram. She said she sees it as an evolution of the early days of the internet and phenomena like “youtube poop.” YouTube poop was a genre of video content popular in the early days of the platform that featured mashups of other existing online content and internet characters.
“There are two audiences for brain rot,” she said, “younger generation of people who are in on the joke, and then older Millennials and above who are just completely bewildered by these popular slang words.”
Many young people said that the brain rot phenomenon has emerged as a reaction to a younger generation of internet users, Gen Alpha, making a larger impact on the online world as they come of age.
“Gen Z is, for the first time, feeling like we’re not the youngest girls in school anymore,” said 26-year-old Zach Carter, who does partnerships for a media startup in New York. “So there’s this opportunity to share digital community with Gen Alpha and mock the way they’re consuming media.”
In an increasingly vast and chaotic internet, where young people rarely have their own spaces and major social platforms have been colonized by Boomers and their Gen X parents, brain rot content allows Gen Z creators to build community online.
“All of these different social media platforms are incentivized to have everyone, everywhere, all at once,” said brain rot creator Cohen. “[Brain rot is how young people] differentiate the internet they are on vs the internet their dads are on. It’s a reaction to there being no kind of space anymore for young people online that isn’t immediately seen by their parents.”
Due to the ubiquity of social media and smartphones for Gen Zers, along with the pandemic forcing them all even more online, many of their formative years have been spent in front of a screen.
“For Gen Z and Gen Alpha, we had all these big milestones [in our lives] happen online,” said Carter. “So we had to find ways to talk to each other and be weird. I remember 2020 lockdown. I was finishing college, and I was like, I want to be on the internet, but this feels like a Millennial internet. We needed a way to talk to each other.”
As brain rot content became more popular, content creators who have leaned hard into it have seen explosive growth.
Natalie Tran, a 19-year-old actress and content creator in Minneapolis, MN, began creating brain rot content in late February. Since then, her accounts have gone from 200,000 followers across social platforms to over 1.8 million. Cox, the Gen Z actor who translates the lyrics of popular songs into brain rot, has amassed over 335,000 followers on TikTok and tens of millions of views.
“Older generations can look down [on us] like, omg they’re so lobotomized, they’re so internet pilled,” said Carter, “but I think we’re just making our own space, and people have always done that online.”
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