Collins English Dictionary earlier this week named “mogging” its word of the year for 2026, picking a slang term that began a decade ago as gym talk for the most physically dominant man, passed through the online manosphere and has now been taken over by young people who mostly use it as a joke.
The publisher said use of the word rose 210% this year. Its lexicographers track the Collins Corpus, a 27-billion-word database that draws partly from social media.
To mog is to outshine, per Collins, which lists mogging as slang for outperforming someone or something. Rachel Quin, who wrote the dictionary’s blog post on the word, put it more plainly: if someone or something has made you look “a bit rubbish by comparison”, you have been mogged.
Collins managing director Alex Beecroft said the choice showed “how each generation leaves its mark on language”.
Where did the word come from?
Collins traces the word to AMOG, short for “alpha male of the group”. It surfaced around 2016 as a noun in bodybuilding culture. It later became a verb and circulated in the manosphere – the network of online forums and influencers that push aggressive ideas of masculinity.
In that setting, the word was meant seriously. It found a home in “looksmaxxing”, a subculture of young men who rate one another’s looks on supposedly quantitative measures such as jawline and facial symmetry. To be mogged was to lose.
The Clavicular kickstart
{{/usCountry}}In that setting, the word was meant seriously. It found a home in “looksmaxxing”, a subculture of young men who rate one another’s looks on supposedly quantitative measures such as jawline and facial symmetry. To be mogged was to lose.
The Clavicular kickstart
{{/usCountry}}Clips from the livestreams of Braden Peters, known as Clavicular, helped pull the word out of the forums, though he did not coin it. Peters, a 20-year-old American streamer, built a following on Kick and TikTok with looksmaxxing content. Clips of him mogging other men by standing beside them so that they looked ordinary went viral.
The word was later turned on him. A clip of Peters beside a larger, more muscular fraternity leader at Arizona State University spread early this year as proof that he had been “frame-mogged”. In May, a Miami-Dade judge sentenced him to six months’ probation in a case stemming from a video of him shooting an apparently dead alligator in the Everglades, and social media decided the judge had mogged him too. By then, the word had left the manosphere and began being co-opted into the wider Gen Z and Gen Alpha lexicons.
Also read: ‘Maxxing’ is Dictionary.com’s word of the year: Origin and evolution of the viral suffix
Has it lost its toxic edge?
Collins said the younger generations now use the word “in a playful and ironic way when someone is upstaged”. It has spread well beyond looks into compounds such as stylemogging, carmogging and lifemogging, and NBC News reported that it had reached middle school classrooms.
Some observers are less convinced it has softened. Psychotherapist Jonathan Alpert told NBC News that words like mogging and maxxing give teenagers a vocabulary for a ranking system they already feel they live inside. Simon Copland, a sociology researcher at the Australian National University, told Australia’s ABC that some influencers use “dodgy science” to rate looks.
Why do slang words keep winning?
Mogging follows a run of slang winners. Oxford University Press picked “rizz”, a clipping of charisma, in 2023, “brain rot” in 2024 and “rage bait” in 2025. Collins chose “brat”, from Charli XCX’s album, in 2024. Dictionary.com picked “6-7”, a Gen Alpha phrase (a number, really) even it struggled to define, in 2025, and “maxxing” this year.
Cambridge chose “parasocial” for 2025, a term sociologists coined in 1956 to describe television viewers’ one-sided bonds with on-screen personalities. Merriam-Webster chose “slop”, which meant soft mud in the 1700s, but now describes low-quality content churned out using artificial intelligence.
How words change meaning
“Silly” meant happy or blessed in Old English and settled on foolish by the 1570s. “Nice”, rooted in the Latin nescius, or ignorant, once meant foolish, then took on agreeable in 1769 and kind by 1830. “Awful” and “awesome” both grew out of awe, one turning bad and the other good.
Linguists call the slide downward pejoration and the climb upward amelioration. If Collins is right, mogging is a fast case of the second.
Also read: Gen Z slang of the day: ‘The ick’. Know the meaning and how people use this term
Ok, which words survive?
Most slang does not last. Kate Burridge, professor of linguistics at Monash University, has said heavy use drains slang of energy, and that the slang that survives becomes ordinary language. “Clever” and “nowadays” were once dismissed as slang. Connie Eble, a University of North Carolina linguist who collected student slang for decades, found that only a tiny minority of terms lasted 10 years. Short words such as “cool” fared best.
The best-known survivor began as a newspaper joke. On March 23, 1839, the Boston Morning Post printed “o.k.”, short for “oll korrect”, a deliberate misspelling of “all correct”. Newspapers in Boston and New York were then in a craze for such joking abbreviations. Most of those faded, while OK went global.
Mogging shares some traits with the survivors. It is short and already spawns compounds. It also faces the hazard Burridge describes, since heavy use wears slang out.