Ask LLOG: Origins of slop
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From J.L.:
Language Log has only one entry on slop (Dec. 21,2025), and I couldn't figure out how to comment there. I was wondering about its origins. Could it be a non-ethnic version of schlock? The sound is similar, and the meaning is identical. If so, the change might be part of a more general trend — Yiddish terms fading from American speech, even or especially in social and geographic places where they were more common. At least that's my very unscientific impression. Is there any data on this?
For slop, Wiktionary says (Etymology 2):
Probably from Middle English *sloppe (attested in plural form sloppes), representing Old English *sloppe (attested in cūsloppe), alternative form of Old English slyppe. Related to slip.
For schlock, Wiktionary says:
From Yiddish שלאַק (shlak), related to German Schlag (“blow, strike, hit”).
So the actual etymologies are different, despite the similarities in sound and the overlap in (figurative) meanings.
The Wiktionary entry for slop adds this additional etymology:
(Internet slang) Possibly a backformation from goyslop.
…which is apparently an anti-semitic coinage, traced back to 4chan in 2016, with the senses
- (Internet slang, 4chan slang, offensive) Low-quality, unhealthy food, seen in antisemitic circles as being promoted by Jews for mass consumption by gentiles for malicious purposes.
- (Internet slang, 4chan slang, offensive, by extension) Low-quality entertainment, seen as being promoted by Jews in a similar manner, typically including perceived political agendas and promoting a certain worldview.
Wiktionary offers as a synonym zogslop, from From ZOG (“Zionist Occupation Government”) + -slop.
For the noun-forming suffix -slop, Wiktionary offers 15 examples of derived terms, where X-slop can apparently mean slop produced by X or slop produced for X, or maybe just slop about X or slop connected with X in some way:
In addition to the 12/21/2025 post that J.L. cites, there's also "'Slop'", 12/13/2025, covering the status of slop as 2025 WOTY from various sources.
Update — I agree with J.W. Brewer and others in the comments that a figurative generalization from slop as food for farm animals (at least pigs and cows) is no doubt the source for Wikipedia's sense 8, and slop in that sense has been used since the 18th century if not earlier. What's new, according to Wikipedia, is a fashion for using X-slop in a sense that presupposes a negative attitude toward the process of provisioning "slop" to or for or by X's.
Update #2 — But this 1747 essay, written on behalf of the "Suinean race", complains that "instead of the nutritive Food of Pease and Beans, they are swill'd up with the nauseous Slop of Distillers and Brewers unwholesome Grains and Molosses, which soon puff them up with a false spungy Flesh and a slimly oily Fat, not only exceedingly prejudicial to the Constitution of our own Species, but likewise to the Constitutions of those who partake of us, …" So slop as food, even for pigs, has been negatively evaluated for at least three centuries.
Update #3 — The New York Times Magazine is on the goyslop case: "How 'Goy' Went from Yiddish to Antisemitic Dog Whistle to Zoomer Slang", 6/18/2026.
J.W. Brewer said,
June 17, 2026 @ 9:33 am
Here's an example from an 1897 book review I found in the google books corpus: "There never was anything in all this world quite so provincial as American literature. When we over here are not reading slop we read the books that bear the approval of London." Or this doggerel from the October 1920 issue of Farm Journal: "I read all kinds of printed junk / the good, the noble and the punk / the ancient and the new / and men who see me reading slop / predict that if I do not stop / my head will go askew."
These both seem like wiktionary's current sense 8 ("Content or entertainment which is worthless, or produced and consumed mindlessly"), so I don't see any need to credit 4chan or 21st-century anti-Semites in general.
Anubis Bard said,
June 17, 2026 @ 9:38 am
My personal impression would have been that it was related to pig slop, which is the wet mix of food waste and garbage that one would feed to pigs. To me, it's an evocative image for the process of LLMs absorbing and regurgitating ever more degraded inputs and outputs.
J.W. Brewer said,
June 17, 2026 @ 9:45 am
That one I dated to 1920 appears in multiple periodicals that year and thereafter and seems likely to have originated in the syndicated column of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Mason.
J.W. Brewer said,
June 17, 2026 @ 9:52 am
To Anubis Bard's point, I think the metaphorical extension from "low-quality food consumed by farm animals" to "low-quality 'content' consumed by humans disdained or at best pitied by the speaker" is so obvious it may have occurred to various writers independently on a number of occasions before eventually becoming a standardized additional sense of slop. I don't think the LLM's are necessary for the metaphor to work, which is why the earlier uses I noted don't seem surprising to me.
Frans said,
June 17, 2026 @ 11:49 am
Food for humans has also been called "slop" by extension for long before some supposed 2016 4chan origin, provided it's of a certain variety.
For example, in COCA:
> Not extra portions of generic slop on a plate.
Is That It? | WDWMAGIC – Unofficial Walt Disney World discussion
2012 http://forums.wdwmagic.com/threads/is-that-it.855182/
> stayed at X shelter, cooked slop tarts, tossed and turned under a leaky roof, got up at 6 am
As Far as the Eye Can See: David Brill: 9781889386447: Amazon
2012
I'm confident you can find much older still, but these two are within the top 5 results for the word slop…
Lars Skovlund said,
June 17, 2026 @ 12:47 pm
Surely, the adjective sloppy is derived from this?
Kenny Easwaran said,
June 17, 2026 @ 3:51 pm
I recall a year or two ago hearing the word "sludge" occasionally used in similar ways:
http://sludge.urbanup.com/17835223
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sludge_content
I think "slop" is both more general about the type of content, and more specific that it's usually AI-generated.
AntC said,
June 17, 2026 @ 4:43 pm
@Lars Surely, the adjective sloppy is derived from this?
There's two senses (at least) for slop, with differing etymologies that have fallen together. There's two sense of sloppy likewise.
Wearers of sloppy jeans/sloppy pullovers might have sloppy mental processes that tend to produce sloppy thoughts — that is, mental slop.
That plant's modern spelling is cowslip; compare also oxlip, which also smuggles in the slyppe "slime" word.
Barbara Phillips Long said,
June 18, 2026 @ 12:55 am
Popular fast-casual meals in bowls are referred to as "slop bowls." The Wegmans near me has a variety of bowls that combine grains, greens, vegetables, and meat or other proteins, so they qualify for the term "slop bowls" even if they aren't sold as such. An article in the Guardian critiques the offerings in Britain:
"A slop bowl is the universal term for a mishmash of pick-your-own dishes assembled and sold in fast-casual spots that have become the de facto working lunch. The contents vary (they tend to feature Asian and eastern Mediterranean dishes) but as the name suggests, it is always served in a bowl, and by the time you’ve got to your desk, has usually become slop. They can cost anything from £7 to £25 depending on what you add – much like coffee, the slop bowl is as customisable as a modular shelving unit from Ikea."
https://www.theguardian.com/food/2026/mar/22/slop-takeaway-salad-lunch-bowls-morwenna-ferrier
There's also a (paywalled to me) NY Times article on various kinds of slop at:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/19/style/ai-slop-slop-bowls-shein-slop-hauls.html
"Slop bowl" has an older meaning as part of a porcelain tea service:
"A slop bowl, slop basin or waste bowl is one of the components of a traditional tea set. It was used to empty the cold tea and dregs in tea cups before refilling with hot tea, as there were often tea leaves in the bottom of the cups."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slop_bowl
Porcelain washstand sets also had slop jars (or slop pots or slop buckets) into which dirty water or the contents of the chamber pot could be dumped and carried out for removal.
One writer says slop jars had two handles, to distinguish them from one-handled chamber pots:
https://cass-thatoldhouse.blogspot.com/2009/10/for-tina-on-show-and-tell-friday-slop.html
wgj said,
June 18, 2026 @ 2:54 am
From Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/slop
Etymology
Noun (1)
of uncertain origin
Note: This word has traditionally been traced back to Middle English sloppes, attested once, in the alliterative Morte Arthure (ca. 1440), and then further traced to Old English -sloppe in cusloppe, a variant of cūslyppe cowslip, in which -sloppe is taken to mean "dung, excrement." The passage in the Morte Arthure in which sloppes occurs describes Arthur and his knights disembarking from boats and wading ashore: "Londis als a lyon with lordliche knyghtes, / Slippes in the sloppes o slante to þe girdyll" (lines 3922-23). The Middle English Dictionary tentatively defines the word as "muddy waters." Note that it forms an alliterative pair with slippes, from which it differs only by a vowel. No further attestations of slop appear before the seventeenth century, and then again often paired with slip. The sense "medicine in the form of a tasteless drink or liquid food" occurs in 1658 as slops, in 1668 as slip-slops. Though slip-slop has been taken as a compound based on slop, the possibility that the compound is actually based on slip suggests itself—in which case slop would be an affective coinage that may have been made more than once and is not datable to Old English. Compare slop entry 3.
Noun (2)
Middle English slop, sloppe "loose outer garment," going back to Old English -slop, in oferslop "loose outer garment, surplice," going back to Germanic *slupa- (whence also Middle Dutch slop "upper garment [as a priest's surplice]," overslop "upper garment, foreskin," Middle High German slopf, slupf "loop, noose," Old Icelandic sloppr "loose garment, vestment"), probably going back to an ablauting n-stem paradigm *slaubōn- (nominative), *sluppas (genitive), going back to Indo-European *slou̯bh-ōn-, *slubh-n-ós, derivative of the verbal base *sleu̯bh- "move easily, slip" — more at sleeve
Verb
probably derivative of slop entry 1
Note: The sense "to lap up," attested since the sixteenth century, may be of independent origin. The Oxford English Dictionary's citation from Thomas Tusser's A Hundreth Good Pointes of Husbandrie, printed in 1557 ("Their milke slapt in corners, their creame al to sost"), placed under the sense "to spill or splash (liquid)," is 250 years earlier than the next citation and probably an instance of a different word (slab?).
J.L. said,
June 18, 2026 @ 5:46 pm
The original letter was asking whether there might be a connection between two trends:
1. The proliferation of slop to mean low-quality stuff.
2. The decline of the Yiddish terms generally (I was not at all sure about this one) including “schlock.”
“AI slop” seemed strange to me because the stuff does not look especially sloppy. But it is schlocky. As the above comments say, “slop” does have that history. But I doubt that the people who first started talking about AI slop were aware of a usage that had been dormant for a century. That may also be true for the anti-Semitic usage that M.L. found. The more important question is diffusion. Why did “slop” catch on? My guess was that it sounded right because it echoed a synonym, “schlock”, that had faded but not completely.
wgj said,
June 19, 2026 @ 11:37 am
@JL: I've never heard of "schlock", yet "slop" sounded just right intuitively to me as well. I also disagree on the postulation that AI slop isn't particularly sloppy – they were sloppy indeed when they first began to flood the internet (which is when the term was popularized), as exemplified by the viral clip of Will Smith eating spaghetti. Even today, AI continues to hallucinate, and to ignore direct command, behavior that many would describe as "sloppy" if a carried out by human.
S Frankel said,
June 19, 2026 @ 12:19 pm
ngrams for schlock and schlocky show almost nothing until about 1960, which seems very late for a Yiddishism. There's a steady peak until around 2000 and then a decline. Some alternate spellings (shlock, shlok) have smaller peaks earlier but the general pattern is much the same.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=schlocky&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&case_insensitive=true&corpus=en&smoothing=3
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=schlocky&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&case_insensitive=true&corpus=en&smoothing=3
tsts said,
June 19, 2026 @ 6:21 pm
While schlock may ultimately have come from the German schlagen, it seems that it might more directly come from the German word Schlacke ("slag"), which derives itself from schlagen. See https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Schlacke, which I realize may not be a reliable reference.
John McNaught said,
June 19, 2026 @ 6:52 pm
Re: traced to Old English -sloppe in cusloppe, a variant of cūslyppe cowslip, in which -sloppe is taken to mean "dung, excrement."
Slop in this sense was prevalent in the UK until relatively recently, in the world of the prison system, where, due to lack of sanitation in Victorian-era cells, prisoners engaged in the practice each morning of slopping out, i.e., emptying and cleaning their human waste receptacles. I have always thought of AI slop in this coprolexical sense…
DDeden said,
June 19, 2026 @ 9:45 pm
My guess is that slop was a variant of slough (or VV).
Slough is interesting to me. My dad would take me out fishing on the Mississippi, passing Point No Point and Government Cut through the slough (slew, a swamp) to go trolling for walleyes.
Later I worked as a carnival worker, "slough" (slau) meant tear down the tents and rides to move on.
Another word, slough (sluff) means to shed a skin or layer.
I think slop is cognate to the first meaning, and specifically involves sulfurous scent and organic decomposition. That seems to agree with these cites:
slop(n.1)
c. 1400, "mudhole, puddle," probably from Old English -sloppe
The passage in the Morte Arthure in which sloppes occurs describes Arthur and his knights disembarking from boats and wading ashore: "Londis als a lyon with lordliche knyghtes, / Slippes in the sloppes o slante to þe girdyll"
Philip Taylor said,
June 20, 2026 @ 4:05 am
I realise, DD, that we are divided by a common language, but could you possibly explain what you were doing when you were "trolling for walleyes" ?
bks said,
June 20, 2026 @ 6:05 am
Walleyes are freshwater fish, Philip. Trolling means the boat is moving slowly as you trail fishing line and lure. At least that's what it meant on the St. Lawrence River 50 years ago. I've never fished the Mississippi.
Peter Cyrus said,
June 20, 2026 @ 6:24 am
I just read (in Lucy Worsley's If Walls Could Talk) that emptying the chamberpots before the installation of plumbing was called "slopping".
Yves Rehbein said,
June 20, 2026 @ 7:14 am
As for pig slop, sliver obtains a useful etymology. Its meaning "bait made of pieces of small fish" can be related to PIE *(s)ley- "smooth, slick; sticky, slimy”, though the similarity to *gleyH- "to glue, paste, stick together" is unexplained, compare lime, clay.
As for schlock and German Schlag (blow, strike), Schlack-Wurst is indeed a kind of raw sausage in a sleave, but see Wikipedia: it is so called either from the Low German term 'Schlack' for a sort of mush, or alternatively from the term 'Schlackdarm' (derived from this) for the sausage casings used. – lacking attention to detail because as in English slay the onset is not supposed to shift. For the casing, see also Umschlag, einschlagen ("to envelope"). I even have heard ein Schlag of tape. That's a wrap.
DDeden said,
June 20, 2026 @ 10:03 am
Philip, bks has it exactly right.
SlideSF said,
June 20, 2026 @ 10:17 am
Thinking on why "slop" is favored over "schlock" as the term for AI-generated garbage, I first had to disagree with the (admittedly unsure) assessment of JL, who sees a decline in the word "schlock". While it may or may not be true that Yiddishisms in general are in decline in popular usage, "schlock" has taken on a newer, more favorable meaning, such as schlock cinema. Slop on the other hand is never seen as a positive attribute.
I was moved to ask Gemini to enlighten me on the ways in which "schlock" could be viewed in a positive light, and it gave me many examples, finishing with the rather relevant suggestion to ask it to break down down the difference between "schlock" and modern AI-generated "slop".
Here is what they told me (in a nutshell):
"The core difference between schlock and digital "slop" lies in human intent. Schlock is cheap, passionate art made by eccentric humans for an audience, whereas slop is automated content generated by algorithms to farm advertising clicks.
## The Core Differences
* Intentionality: Schlock creators actively choose to be loud, trashy, or melodramatic. Slop has no intention; it is just a machine predicting what will keep a user scrolling. [8]
* Flaws: Schlock features human flaws like bad acting, visible microphone cords, or cheap cardboard sets. Slop features algorithmic flaws like human hands with six fingers, nonsensical text in images, and hallucinated facts. [9, 10, 11]
* Soul: Schlock is fueled by passion, love for a genre, and resourcefulness under a tight budget. Slop is utterly soulless, existing only to fill a layout grid or a social media feed. [12]
* Curation: Schlock becomes a curated cult classic passed down through word of mouth. Slop is a disposable commodity that is forgotten the moment a user swipes past it. [13]
## Examples in the Wild
* Schlock: The Room, 1980s B-horror movies with practical effects, low-budget kung fu cinema, and cheesy pro-wrestling storylines.
* Slop: AI-generated Facebook images of soldiers made of shrimp, programmatic YouTube kids' videos with scrambled audio, and SEO-optimized articles written entirely by large language models to game Google search results. [14]
If you want to dive deeper, let me know if you would like to look at:
* The economic drivers behind the rise of internet slop.
* How to protect your own digital spaces from content pollution.
* Famous directors who started in schlock and moved to high cinema.
Let me know which direction you'd like to take next."
J.W. Brewer said,
June 20, 2026 @ 2:05 pm
Just re the "non-ethnic version of schlock" speculation: word-initial /ʃl/ is a very conspicuous marker of YIddishisms in AmEng, since it is as best as I can tell barred by our phonotactics from "native" words whereas in both standard High German and Yiddish it's the other way 'round, with /ʃl/ quite common in word-initial position while word-initial /sl/ is barred by their phonotactics except maybe in loanwords. That said, AmEng speakers can in practice pronounce the /ʃl/ perfectly well in loanwords and I'm not aware of any trend to "smooth out" such loan words by shifting their pronunciation to /sl/. Is there an example I'm not thinking of? (To be fair, I can think of some now-antique proper-name examples in a similar context, like the /ʃn/ in the surname Schneider being Americanized as Snyder with /sn/.)
Yves Rehbein said,
June 20, 2026 @ 2:05 pm
"There's two senses (at least) for slop, with differing etymologies that have fallen together. – @AntC
Interestingly, the same dichotomy appears in German schlabbern ("to lap", cf. slabber), schlabbrig ("loose"), and schlürfen (slurp) and schlurfen (slouch). See Schleppe, the long end of a dress that is so long it has to be schlepped by a "train" of hand maidens, and Schlabberhose*, perhaps baggy pants where sleeves slip over the sole of the shoes and drag over the ground – to drag one's feet is schlurfen.
Presumably that's onomatopoeic. It's a childish register as parents tell their kids the way their elders told them. However, since I mentioned sliver ("bait made of small pieces of fish") and there's a parallel line of argument to fish meal to be drawn, I argue that German Müll ("trash") had the same semantic development as slop, that my inference holds up vis-a-vis meal, to mill, grind, German schlurfen, indeed schleifen (to grind, polish).
See also to slack (off).
*: the only relevant textile in Grimm's dictionary (1852 – 1961) is Schlabberlatz, -lätzchen, -tuch "bib", where it seems to mean saliva, pituita, but schlabbete redirects to schlappetein the vicinity of Schlapphut ("slouch hat" [WT]),Schlappe (flip-flop, slipper) etc. It still makes sense seeing that de Vaan argues for a relation of lubricus to schlep (vel sim.).
Yves Rehbein said,
June 20, 2026 @ 2:11 pm
PS: German Schlaghose all but confirms my hunch about the pants, though not exactly baggypants, which I wore much to the puzzlement of parents and in contrast to the ravers' Schlaghosen ("bell-bottoms, flares" [WT]).
wgj said,
June 21, 2026 @ 9:51 am
If we were to theorize a Germanic origin of slop with a schl* initial, then an obvious candidate would be schlapp, meaning flaccid, which would seem to be a cognate of slop meaning "loose outer garment" (see above). The related noun Schlappe is a vernacular word usually meaning "defeat" but sometimes also a flaccid penis, or by extension, something non-performing. There would be a relation to slop as in AI slop in there, though it does appear to be rather a stretch.