2026 Banned Word: “Unalive”

Hello everyone! Hank here, founder and president of hankeatspaint and executive chairperson for the annual banned word selection committee. What a fuckin' year! Before I share remarks from the committee and executive board, I'd like to first reflect on 2025's "Immersive" ban. Great strides were made this year with this ban and it intersected with issues across culture and politics in ways that were hard to predict last December. Reflection on the notion of "immersion" made a positive impact on how users approached an ever quickening influx of AI images, writing, content and other advertisements. The network that spun out from this awareness is hard to map completely but it is far reaching and resulted in a decline of the use of "immersive" language to describe artwork and experience unnecessarily. Below is a graph.

As always, the selection process is contentious and this year was no exception. There was a very strong case made for a re-ban of "Aesthetic" as well as a possible double ban (like we saw in 2022 with "NFT" and "Content") involving "Queer" and "Performative." After the conclusion of our first round, it seemed all but certain that "Camp" was actually going to be 2026's ban. There was major support in all coalitions for this ban. Following the logic of previous bans, that this word had become (and possibly always was) utterly meaningless and should be actively stricken from the lexicon. There was then much debate about exactly how much of a non-word "Camp" actually is and that a ban might not be the solution to fostering a fuller appreciation and understanding of camp as something that might actually hold the capacity to be pejorative rather than a positive or neutral descriptor.

This debate created a matrix of doubt around "Camp" in the final days until the conversation turned. What was exciting about a "Camp" ban was the initial feeling that this word is now without use critically. The committee and executive board realized that a word had never been banned because of a feeling that it was actually useless. Reorientation and reinterpretation had always been the assumed objective but the fixation on camp seemed to mark a shift in feeling. What word could possibly fit in this category as a word that is not just useless but detrimental and egregious. At risk of appearing behind the curve, the final vote was unanimous for "Unalive."

"Unalive" is a word meant to refer to death, suicide, murder and the range of killing, self harm and all in between that results in the ending of a life. It is a word that has gained significant traction in many online communities to subvert content labels and computer learning programs that both mine online spaces for material and for the purposes of filtering or removing content that does not abide that community's terms and services or conditions, which may forbid explicit mentions of violence. Explicit here may mean graphic but may also mean direct: "My grandmother died in her nursing home" or "My friend took their own life by suicide." Unalive may be used in this context to say "My grandmother was unalived in her nursing home" or "My friend unalived themselves." One use is needlessly unclear and unsympathetic. The other is strange and seems to do a disservice to the acknowledgment of pain that may drive someone to suicide. "Unalive" is meant to subvert this detection by machines but also our impulse to relate and understand.

Unalive is a useless word. It not only signals a willingness to consent to censorship of basic human experience, but a general squeamishness around death in all forms it may visit us in our lives. "Through our capitulation, we distance ourselves from our own shared humanity which is that we will all know death because each of us will someday die. Somehow, on some day," said our search chair, who first presented "unalive" into late contention. "If we as a species are to adapt successfully and sustainably to virtual spaces as places of productive, human and humane discourse, whatever the subject, we must continue to be free to use language that describes plainly but also viscerally the material experience of being flesh and blood, of living. There is no need for a word that filters and reduces how we talk about death. And that it may enter spaces that are not subject to machine learning or filtration to describe death is especially bad. Language that subtracts from our ability to discuss death openly and candidly, in life and in art, is a danger to us all and should be banned."