If 2026 had a mood, Dictionary.com thinks it can be summed up in seven letters with a double x. The online dictionary on Monday named “maxxing” its Word of the Year, a slang term for pushing anything, from sleep to protein intake, as far as it will go.
The word works on its own or as a suffix glued to almost anything. Gym devotees go “gymmaxxing”, the well-rested practise “sleepmaxxing”, and fans of blankets and candles talk about “cozymaxxing”. In offices, “tokenmaxxing” became shorthand for relying more and more on AI, and the term even turned up in US federal government messaging as “homelandmaxxing”.
Dictionary.com picks its winner by tracking how often words appear in news coverage, on social platforms and in searches, then weighing what they say about the year. Steve Johnson, director of lexicography at Dictionary Media Group, told CBS News that what set this one apart was its reach across very different fields, something slang rarely manages. By far the most common form is still “looksmaxxing”, the drive to perfect one’s appearance, which he said grew by more than 1,000% in the material analysed since January.
The roots go back further than social media. English speakers have been “maxing out” credit cards for decades, and Johnson traces the optimisation sense to game theory in the 1940s and later to tabletop role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons, where “min-maxing” meant pumping one trait of a character at the expense of everything else. Gen Z added the extra x.
The choice is also an easier one to explain than last year’s pick, the baffling “67”. And the word already carries its own backlash: tongue-in-cheek coinages such as “normalmaxxing” and Johnson’s favourite, “nothingmaxxing”, which applies maximum effort to doing absolutely nothing.
