How 'Mogging' Went From Manosphere Insult to Everyday Slang

Someone, Tony Thorne says, told him recently that they had been "walk-mogged". The meaning was modest: another person about their age, out on the street, had simply walked faster than they did. Thorne, a language consultant at King's College London, offers it as proof of how far a word has travelled. "Mogging" has been named Collins English Dictionary's word of the year, after a surge in use over the past twelve months.

Collins defines it as a playful term for outshining or outperforming someone or something. Its roots are far less light-hearted. The word grew out of the online language of the manosphere, a community built around hyper-masculine and often misogynistic content. Thorne traces it, as many do, to the acronym AMOG, for Alpha Male of the Group, which circulated in the 2010s on bodybuilding and incel message boards. Incel stands for involuntary celibate.

Thorne describes the early meaning as toxic, a term about extreme competitiveness and the urge to dominate. Then a younger and broader audience took it up. "They started to diffuse it," he says, using it ironically and teasingly.

The recent surge is tied to Clavicular, an influencer known for "looksmaxxing" content, who has pleaded not guilty to charges including rape. He regularly posts clips of himself trying to "mog" people in public spaces. The word reached a wider audience earlier this year when posts describing the streamer as "brutally frame mogged" went viral. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the seven-time Mr Olympia, then nodded to the term's bodybuilding origins by posting footage of himself in his prime, with the ironic caption "someone just tried to explain this new trend 'frame mogging' to me..."

Thorne sees a pattern in slang escaping the community that coined it. He compares mogging to drag queen slang that was widely borrowed until recently: "it was lit", "she slays", "he's a king", "she's a queen". It has become, he says, part of a sillier, kinder kind of celebrity banter. He believes the word has been "largely detoxified" because it mostly keeps a tinge of mockery or irony. He cannot speak for every instance, he adds, but among the young people he knows who use it, there is nothing unhealthy in it any more.

The celebrity examples bear that out. British Vogue captioned a photo of Heated Rivalry actor Hudson Williams arriving at the 2026 Golden Globes as him "mogging at the Golden Globes". Figure skater Alysa Liu said in an interview this year that her "main goal for this competition was to mog".

The competitive core remains, though. Thorne says the language still carries an element of hyper-individual, competitive performance culture. Online debate has pitted People magazine's 2026 sexiest man alive, The Pitt actor Noah Wyle, against the 2025 winner, Wicked star Jonathan Bailey. Last year, fans of Zara Larsson and Tate McRae set the two singers against each other after Larsson opened for McRae on the North American leg of the Miss Possessive tour. Some felt the support act had "mogged" the headliner. Larsson pushed back, speaking of her respect for McRae on the Call Her Daddy podcast. Cillian Murphy has also been drawn in, compared favourably to his co-stars by some.

There are signs the word is loosening further, away from rivalry and towards simply looking commanding. Some online commentary said Maya Jama was mogging on Celebrity Traitors, even while hanging out of a helicopter. Thorne likens that gushing usage to "slay". He also notes how elastic it has become: style-mogging, height-mogging, car-mogging. "You can apply it to almost anything now," he says.

What to watch is whether those new forms keep spreading, and whether the competitive edge survives the word's move into everyday speech.