'Lore' Named 2026 Social Media Word of the Year After More Than 10 Million Mentions
CHICAGO — Sprout Social, the social media analytics company, released its second annual Social Media Dictionary on October 14 and named 'Lore' its 2026 social media Word of the Year. The dictionary analyzes public posts across major platforms throughout the year, and 'Lore' drew more than 10 million social mentions, the most of any term tracked.
'Lore' traditionally refers to the backstory and accumulated lore around a person or a fictional world, and online it is now widely used for someone's personal history and hidden stories — as in the everyday trend the company cited of people realizing a friend 'has lore.' In its announcement, distributed via GlobeNewswire, Sprout Social said the term's rise reflects a shift among social users away from quick, surface-level posts toward content with context, history and narrative. As an example of the shift's commercial value, the company pointed to a McDonald's campaign built on The Backrooms, a viral internet mythology, which earned more than 16.6 million views and 744,000 engagements.
The other top words of 2026 included 'Slop,' with 8.8 million mentions, used for low-quality, mass-produced SI content as audiences pushed back against it; 'Niche,' mentioned 4.2 million times as communities gathered in smaller corners of shared interest; and 'Maxxing,' with 3.5 million mentions, which also appeared in more than 67,000 news articles.
The dictionary also named the year's top marketing words: 'Unhinged,' with 4.6 million mentions for brands' chaotic voice, and 'Episodic,' with 115,960 mentions, as 57% of social users said they want original, multi-part brand video series that mirror television storytelling. Looking ahead to 2027, the company flagged 'Polyester' (264,424 mentions, used figuratively by Gen Z for anything cheap or over-polished), 'MySpace' (203,070 mentions, tied to nostalgia for less algorithmic corners of the internet) and 'Influencer Fatigue' (62,238 mentions). Scott Morris, Sprout Social's chief marketing officer, said in the announcement that audiences are craving content with depth and genuine effort rather than fleeting surface-level attention.
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 纽约地铁钱伯斯街站内低头看手机的乘客 · Billie Grace Ward 摄，CC BY 2.0，维基共享资源 / Riders looking at their phones at the Chambers Street subway station in New York · Billie Grace Ward, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
