Each year, the editors of Ragan Communications and PR Daily select a word that captures the climate that communicators have navigated (or endured, as the case may be) over the past twelve months. We’re serving up slop as our 2025 word of the year. In English, it first surfaced around the 1400s as a noun for mudholes and dung-heavy detritus. From the 1600s to the 1800s, it came to encompass unappealing food, household waste, and so on.