For about five hundred years brat was something you called a child you were fed up with. In 2024 people started using it as a compliment.

The change came from Charli XCX. Her sixth studio album, Brat, came out on 7 June 2024. It had a lime-green cover with the title set in small, plain lowercase letters. The album was a hit, but the word went further. "Brat summer" became shorthand for a season lived loudly and messily, without apology. After she posted "kamala IS brat", the Harris campaign took up the look, and the word moved from fan communities into the political news. (She later said it had not been meant as an explicit endorsement.)

Collins named brat its Word of the Year for 2024. It defined the new sense as "characterized by a confident, independent, and hedonistic attitude". Collins called brat more than a hugely successful album: it was "a cultural phenomenon that has resonated with people globally", and brat summer had become "an aesthetic and a way of life". Collins's managing director, Alex Beecroft, also noted how many of that year's words had been popularised by Generations Z and Alpha, and called it the most "brat" Word of the Year list ever.

Collins wasn't alone in noticing. Dictionary.com put brat on its own 2024 shortlist, behind demure, and reported a rise of around 1,000% in digital media use compared with 2023.

The word's history makes the change neater. Around 1400, brat meant a coarse cloak. By the 1530s it meant a child, at first an unwanted one rather than a naughty one. "Ill-mannered child" is recorded by 1808, and by 1968 the word was being used of adults with childish manners. The 2024 sense keeps the bad behaviour and drops the disapproval.