The Collins Dictionary has pandered to the youth audience by choosing the word "mogging" as its word of the year for 2026. And they're a little early in doing so.
That's not a typo for what happens when you walk down a dark alley in the big city. It’s a slang word, because of course it is. It’s most often used by younger generations as "a playful and ironic way when someone is upstaged." It means to outshine or outperform someone.
You can mog someone or you can be mogged; you can even engage in mogging. But it is not a noun — one cannot be a mog.
It also has nothing to do with a moggy, which is a British term for a cat of unknown breeding and pedigree, like a mutt cat.
Talk about your premature selection. Or were they just trying to mog the other dictionaries?
It's like those fair-weather fans who leave a football game when there's still a quarter left. Or when my parents would take me to a baseball game, and we had to leave by the middle of the eighth inning to beat traffic.
The problem is, not only does Collins jump the gun, but they always seem to be eager to pick slang words and not newly coined words or old words that have taken on a new significance for a larger population.
Why can't they revive an old word like "uliginous," which means things that are muddy, oozy, and slimy? Or "obstreperous," which means being overly noisy and difficult to control. As in, "the Collins dictionary staff became intoxicated and of obstreperous at their end of the year holiday party."
Or even "snool," which is someone who subjects himself to the authority of another, or to snivel and to submit timidly; to keep in subjection by tyrannical means. That one seemed appropriate for this particular time.
(Special thanks to my Grandiloquent Word Of The Day calendar for the assist.)
Mogging comes, as you might have guessed, from the manosphere side of the Internet, because those guys seem to come up with stupid words for everything. It’s a shortened form of AMOG, which means "Alpha male of the group," which comes from the mistaken belief that there are leaders of an animal pack, like a pack of wolves or a pride of lions.
Except there is no such thing. The scientist who came up with the idea of alpha males realized he had made a terrible mistake, and 30 years later, retracted the idea as completely incorrect. Except, the so-called masculinity gurus are not known for their reading, so the news that the scientist retracted the idea of the alpha male would have flown completely over their receding hairlines.
In computer programming terms, the alpha stage is the initial creation of a particular program or application. It's incomplete, faulty, and never works the way it is supposed to. Which, I suppose, is appropriate for the manosphere.
In fact, the biggest gurus and proponents of alpha male behavior and "maxxing" are the Tate brothers, who are currently in a Florida prison, awaiting an extradition hearing to be sent to the UK to face dozens of charges of rape, assault, and sex trafficking. So that should give you an idea of how wildly dumb the idea of an alpha male is and how broken and faulty their gurus are.
The Dictionary experts over at Collins picked the word because they saw a 210% increase in the usage of the word in 2026, so in order to look cool to young people, they adopted it as their word of the year.
Keep in mind that these are the same people who picked "vibe coding" as last year's word. The word that means using artificial intelligence to write your computer code for you instead of doing it all yourself was their big choice. This year, a word bandied about by masculinity gurus to mean "doing a good job" is their selection.
Personally, I would like it to become one of the words that LSSU banishes every year. And since Collins nominated their word of the year way early, I actually did that. Right after I wrote this column, I hopped over to .lssu.edu/banished and nominated it for banishment.
Good going, Collins! Way to be the alpha dictionary of all the dictionaries. You certainly outperformed the competition by naming your word way earlier than necessary.
Next year, maybe you'll wait until the end of the year like the rest of us and pick a useful, less stupid one.
Photo credit: MaybeMaybeMaybe (Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons 2.0)
My new humor novel, Mackinac Island Nation, is finished and available from 4 Horsemen Publications. You can get the ebook and print versions here.