Dictionary.com Names 'Maxxing' Word of the Year, but the Teen Creatine Data Tied to Looksmaxxing Doesn't Track It

On September 1, a Facebook user named DeanLin posted a warning in capital letters: if a man is pheromone-maxxing, skipping showers so his natural scent draws women, "they are not the love of your life." Dictionary.com quoted the post in its slang entry for the suffix. Less than two months later, on October 25, the site named maxxing its 2026 Word of the Year.

Dictionary.com defines maxxing as pursuing an activity to the fullest or optimizing some part of your life. It traces the suffix to the gaming term min-maxing, then to Reddit and other forums, where the doubled x appeared, and on to TikTok. The site says archived data shows looksmaxxing existing as far back as 2015, and that moneymaxxing, statusmaxxing and surgerymaxxing were circulating by 2021. This year added tokenmaxxing, for using as much AI at work as possible, and nonnamaxxing, for living like an Italian grandmother.

A word that outran its evidence

Dictionary.com's case rests on search interest. It says searches for maxxing "have risen exponentially over the past year" and that looksmaxxing searches skyrocketed in early 2026. Its post gives no search numbers, so the size of the rise cannot be checked from the page. Merriam-Webster took a different route in September, adding about 1,400 entries including looksmaxxing, which it ties to efforts to improve physical attractiveness. Fox Business reported that the publisher requires new entries to show widespread use over time.

Both dictionaries are measuring words. Neither is counting how many people actually do any of this.

What the big dataset does and does not show

The nearest hard data is a University of Michigan study in Annals of Epidemiology, covered on May 18 by Nutrition Insight, a trade publication, under a headline that links looksmaxxing to rising creatine use. The study drew on Monitoring the Future, a nationally representative survey of 874,931 adolescents, average age 16, spanning 2001 to 2024. Among boys, past-year creatine use went from 8.71 percent in 2019-2020 to 16.57 percent in 2023-2024. Among girls it went from 1.22 percent to 3.27 percent. Across all respondents it moved from 6.29 percent in 2001-2002 to 9.68 percent in 2023-2024.

Study author Philip Veliz said he ran the analysis partly because of social media trends that "glorify toxic gym culture" and the rise of "looksmaxxers." That is a motive, not a measurement. The survey asks about supplements and steroids. It cannot say whether a teenager taking creatine ever watched a looksmaxxing video, and nothing in the account I could load says it tried. Worth noting: the paper and Michigan's own release both blocked my requests, so these figures come from Nutrition Insight's account of the study.

The finding that cuts against the scare is steroids. "What surprised me was that steroid use did not increase over the past five years among adolescents," Veliz said, and the account reports a substantial decline since 2001. He called teen creatine use not necessarily a cause for alarm, but a possible signal that someone is chasing muscle. The authors do flag two worries. Pediatric guidance recommends adolescents avoid creatine because evidence on its safety and effectiveness in young people is limited, and teens' perception of steroids as harmful has fallen, more among boys than girls.

One word, very different habits

Dictionary.com says early looksmaxxing communities were largely young men, including participants in the manosphere. Now the family of words turns up in beauty content, workplace talk about AI and wellness advice. Some users are earnest. Others are joking, like the person who relabels an ordinary Friday night of movies and snacks as cozymaxxing.

The site's own slang entry concedes that the suffix has spread "to the point that it may have lost its meaning." That is the problem with treating a word as a trend. A term that covers cosmetic surgery and a night on the couch cannot be tracked as one behavior. I found no survey of how many teenagers practice looksmaxxing in any defined sense, so there is no base rate to say whether the creatine curve belongs to it.

What exists, then, is a word with documented momentum and a supplement trend with documented numbers. The link between them is a plausible story, supported so far by a researcher's stated motive and not by data. Dictionary.com ends its post by asking whether the urge to optimize has peaked or whether next year brings more. A survey that asked teens about the trend by name would answer it better than a search chart.