toxic

In gaming and online communities, toxic describes players or behavior meant to make the experience worse for everyone else: insults, harassment, slurs, rage and deliberate sabotage. A “toxic player” is the person doing it, and a “toxic community” is a game or fandom where that behavior is common.

What counts as toxic

There’s no single agreed line. A review of academic research on the topic found that researchers don’t share a definition either. In practice, people call it toxic when it goes past normal competitiveness:

• Flaming teammates in chat after every mistake
• Slurs, or attacks on someone’s gender, race or voice
• Spamming “ez” or taunts after a win
• Throwing a match or griefing on purpose
• Following someone from game to game to harass them

Outside gaming, “toxic” is everyday slang for any harmful person or situation: a toxic ex, a toxic workplace, toxic positivity.

Examples

• “Muted him in the first two minutes. Toxic.”
• “Great game, toxic community.”
• “You can trash talk without being toxic, it’s not that hard.”

Where the word comes from

“Toxic” comes from the Greek toxikon, a poison for arrows, and has been in English since the 1600s. Merriam-Webster also lists a figurative sense, “extremely harsh, malicious, or harmful,” often used about people. Oxford chose “toxic” as its Word of the Year for 2018, mostly because of phrases like toxic masculinity and toxic relationships.

In gaming, the vocabulary shifted over the 2010s. In 2011, coverage of League of Legends’ player-review Tribunal talked about “antisocial behaviour.” By 2015, outlets like Kotaku were writing about “toxic” players and “toxicity” as a matter of course.

How common is it?

Very. An ADL survey in 2023 found that 76% of adults and 75% of 10- to 17-year-olds had experienced harassment in online multiplayer games.

Toxic vs. trash talk

Trash talk is part of competition, and friends roast each other constantly. It becomes toxic when it’s meant to hurt, keeps going after someone asks you to stop, or targets who a person is rather than how they played.

Related terms

• griefing: deliberately ruining the game for others
• EZ: a taunt after winning
• rage quit: leaving a game in anger
• malding: getting furious over a game
• GG: “good game,” the sporting thing to say

See more terms like this in our gaming slang dictionary.