“Maxxing,” the internet slang term that’s been used in just about every conceivable context—looks-maxxing, fertility-maxxing, friction-maxxing, protein-maxxing, status-maxxing, just to name a handful of examples—has officially been selected by Dictionary.com as its 2026 Word of the Year. Disheartening? Yes. Surprising? Not really.
Aside from its pervasiveness across social media, the slang form of “maximizing” was also given Dictionary.com’s top spot this year because of its broader social connotations. It’s “the linguistic manifestation of a culture increasingly preoccupied with getting the most out of everything,” Steve Johnson, director of lexicography at IXL Learning, Dictionary.com’s parent company. “Whatever we’re doing, we want to push it further.” The same can apparently be said for the use of “maxxing,” which appeared in digital media almost 19 times more often in August of this year than the monthly average for all of 2025, the company said.
The ascent of “maxxing” in pop culture has also gotten a big boost from the AI sector. For much of the past year, businesses across the United States had been “token-maxxing”—encouraging employees to use AI tools as much as possible, theoretically “future-proofing” the business as a whole. But like the hangover after a bender, many of those same companies ended up realizing that token-maxxing came with a steep bill, and have since switched up their strategy to what might be described as token-frugality.
“Data center” (which we’re quite certain is in fact two separate words) was also included in Dictionary.com’s list of top five Words of the Year—an indicator of how deeply technical discussions and debates about AI have permeated the zeitgeist. The other three were “Affordability,” “Odyssey,” and “Unc.”
Oxford University Press and Merriam-Webster have yet to announce their picks for the 2026 Word of the Year, but there’s a very good chance that whatever they are, they’ll be related to AI.
