Are We All Maxxed Out? Dictionary.com Names ‘Maxxing’ Its 2026 Word of the Year

Are you focusmaxxing today? Knowledgemaxxing? Maybe fibermaxxing? Dictionary.com has chosen “maxxing,” which can seemingly be attached as a suffix to any other English word, as its Word of the Year for 2026.

Dictionary.com defines maxxing as “the practice of pursuing an activity to the fullest or optimizing a certain aspect of your life.” It’s not a lot different from older expressions such as taking it to the max, maxing out a credit card or feeling maxed out. Words like max, maximum and maximize have their roots in the Latin maximus — meaning “greatest” or “largest.”

But maxxing takes it to another level. The word has an additional x and can be tacked onto the back of seemingly any word. Dictionary.com said that two of the most common of these in 2026 have been looksmaxxing and tokenmaxxing.

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Looksmaxxing — maximizing one’s physical appearance — was the most popular internet search term in 2026 for derivations of maxxing, according to Dictionary.com. Certain internet content creators popularized the term and have gained large followings with their sometimes extreme approaches to improving their looks.

Tokenmaxxing is another frequently searched term. In the world of AI, token refers to a small bit of written text that AI language models process to formulate responses. The term tokenmaxxing generally refers to using AI as much as possible at work, as companies integrate AI more and more into workflows. It’s no joke: Some companies are tracking and evaluating their workers on how much and how effectively they use AI in their jobs.

Maxxing can also be used on its own, such as, “Have you been maxxing on anything lately?”

Dictionary.com said the popularity of “maxxing” in all its various uses indicates how much we value optimization, as does the rising use of prefixes super- and ultra- in 2025.

“Whatever we’re doing, we want to push it further,” Dictionary.com reports. “But its expanding uses also reveal how people are responding to that impulse. Some embrace it. Some exaggerate it for laughs. Others flip it on its head to describe stepping away from the relentless pursuit of more. The open question is whether this need for optimization has peaked or if we’ll push even harder next year.”

If you let your imagination fly, you can maxx on anything — dietmaxxing to lose weight, bookmaxxing to read more, bingemaxxing for all that streaming.

Data center among the top 5

Dictionary.com’s shortlist of top words this year included affordability, data center (spelled as two words), odyssey and unc. Affordability has been one of the most common words in politics in the lead-up to the midterms — can people pay for what they need? Data centers are sprouting up all over the US and are either gateways to economic prosperity or harbingers of doom, depending on whom you talk to.

Unc, short for uncle, refers to someone who’s out of touch with Gen Z and Gen Alpha culture; and odyssey cracked the top five thanks to the popularity of The Odyssey, Christopher Nolan’s 2026 film adapted from Homer’s Greek epic about Odysseus’ journey home after the Trojan War.