Taking it to the max

Dictionary.com has picked its Word of the Year, and it’s maxxing—two x’s, zero chill.

The word means pushing something to the limit or optimizing some corner of your life, and it fits just about anything. Looksmaxxing got it started. Tokenmaxxing (using as much AI at work as humanly possible) and nonnamaxxing (living like an Italian grandmother) followed. Cozymaxxing is what you call a Friday night on the couch with snacks.

The family tree is a nerdy one. It traces back to min-maxing, a gaming strategy of pumping up a character’s strengths until the weaknesses stop mattering. Somewhere along the way the “min” got swapped out, the word picked up an extra x and Reddit forums did the rest. Looksmaxxing was bouncing around the internet by 2015.

Dictionary.com’s editors see a culture obsessed with optimization—sometimes earnestly, sometimes with a wink, sometimes both. Their own Understatement of the Year: there are now a lot of maxxings. They even floated the next step. “Maxxingmaxxing, anyone?”

Also on the shortlist: affordability, data center, odyssey and unc. Last year’s winner was 67, which tells you how hard this contest is to predict.