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WORDS · LANGUAGE · ETYMOLOGY
WORD OF THE YEAR 2025:
BRAIN-SUCKER 60%
(n.) someone who undeservedly profits off or takes credit for other people’s creative work or ideas
Every year since 2016 here at Haggard Hawks, we’ve shortlisted five suitably unusual and obscure words that sum up the previous twelve months, and turned to our followers and subscribers to vote for one as our Word of the Year. And with this year’s votes counted, the 2025 HH Word of the Year is brain-sucker—someone who undeservedly profits off the ideas and creativity of others.
Let’s be honest, we’ve dealt with content thieves here at HH for years (naming no names, of course) but this one has nothing to do with us. Coming hot on the heels of our friends at Merriam-Webster naming slop their Word of 2025, brain-sucker taps into the onslaught of misappropriated images and computer-plagiarized writing that has swept across the internet ever since generative AI strode into the mainstream. And when it comes to water-guzzling data centres ousting human creativity, it seems nearly two-thirds of you felt the negatives outweighed the positives: brain-sucker picked up a staggering 60% of the votes this year, winning by the largest margin in Haggard Hawks history.
As twenty-first-century as this word might sound, it was actually introduced in the title of a short story called The Brain-Sucker, or The Distress of Authorship, published way back in 1787. In the tale, a young man who has become obsessed with poetry journeys to London to pursue his dream of becoming a writer, and there encounters a devilishly unscrupulous publisher. The publisher installs the man in an artist’s garret, where he can slavishly work on his poetry in peace—all while the publisher is busy profiting off his new talent’s work.
The word has remained in (albeit fairly infrequent) use ever since, with the hallowed Oxford English Dictionary even tracking down a record from 1922 in reference to noted credit-stealer Thomas Edison. But in this new era of AI creative uncreativeness, it may well be time for the brain-sucker to be let out of its garret and given the credit it deserves.
THE 2025 SHORTLIST
recrudescence 13%
(n.) the reappearance of something bad or unwelcome
terre-à-terre 9%
(adj.) uninspired, unimaginative; showing no style or originality
nugaemania 9%
(n.) an obsession with trivial or ultimately unimportant things
Billy Joy’s cow 8%
(n.) something you claim to have dealt with or have control over, that in reality entirely overwhelms you
Elsewhere this year, the 2025 nominees dealt with world leaders, creative monoculture, political distraction, and—in the form of the brilliantly mysterious Billy Joy’s cow—the just general unending amount of grim news that has characterized the decade so far. (In case you’re wondering, the phrase Billy Joy’s cow alludes to an old anecdote from the 1880s, in which a young man was dragged into a ditch by a cow he was walking home, all the while vainly protesting that he still had control of it.)