Maxxed to the max
From IMAXxing to kidmaxxing and beyond. .
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The chatter about Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, which was shot entirely on loud, bulky IMAX cameras and can be seen in its “intended format” in only 25 U.S. theaters, has had me thinking minimally about the movie, which I haven’t yet seen, and maximally about the MAX in IMAX — and about all the ways in which max, or maxx, has been making linguistic inroads.
IMAXxing
IMAX is a trademark for the company originally incorporated, in 1967, as Multiscreen Corporation. (“IMAX” resulted from rejiggering “maximum image.”) Lately, though, it’s also been verbified and gerundified, as in this satirical headline in Hard Times, a satirical news site:
From the article (satire!):
“If you ask me, Nolan’s been IMAXxing because he can’t tell a story on 35mm anymore.” — film critic Ace Watley (satire!)
“Of course he’s IMAXxing, only an idiot would think he wasn’t hitting that Black Tar Cellulose for everything he shoots.” — director James Cameron (satire!)
See also IMAXXING.io, a real website that provides “a last-minute seat alert for your eyeballs”:
Get frame mogged.1 Start retina-smashing today by seeing the full, complete version of The Odyssey on the only screen large enough to make your peripheral vision feel involved.
How can Hard Times and IMAXXING get away with this? Because -maxxing has become everyone’s favorite default suffix. From fibermaxxing to tokenmaxxing, from Bluesky to the U.S. trademark database, everything that can be maxxed is being maxxed to the max.
Early -maxxing
Today’s -maxxings are all over the map, quite literally. But the term’s origins lie in the relatively arcane specialty of academic theory, where min-maxing — minimizing risk, maximizing gain — was coined in the 1940s.
The term was later adopted by the video-game community to mean “minimizing undesirable character traits and maximizing desirable ones.” From there it was a short hop, in the 2010s, to “online incel communities,” as Know Your Meme puts it in an entry on -maxxing. “Looksmaxxing” — enhancing one’s appearance to maximize attractiveness or power — was documented by 2014; “comfy-maxxing” appeared in November 2015. And by the 2020s, says Know Your Meme, “the suffix ‘-maxxing’ became used as a way to indicate one's total and complete attention and efforts towards something.” A pandemic-influenced meme dubbed “You Need to Be X-Maxxing” — “You need to be upping your viral loads. You need to be variant-maxxing” — went viral, you should pardon the expression.
By January 2025, the linguists of the American Dialect Society had seen enough. “-maxxing” was nominated as the Most Creative Word of the Year for 2024, with the explanatory note “(as in looksmaxxing, jawmaxxing).”2 It lost, by a lot, to the X I X-ed, a “phrasal template with an invented irregular verb, used as a playful intensifier (as in ‘the gasp I gusped/guspt,’ ‘the scream I scrempt’).”
Which goes to show that popularity among graduate students and academics does not necessarily predict long-term linguistic success. I haven’t heard “the X I X-ed” in more than a year. Meanwhile, -maxxing is everywhere.
The New York Times seal of approval
In October 2025, Nitsuh Abebe, the New York Times Magazine’s language columnist, anointed -maxxing “the suffix that tells us to ruthlessly optimize everything”:
“Should You Be ‘Fibermaxxing’?” The Times asks. (No, a bodybuilder might answer, you should be proteinmaxxing.) People post pictures of Dave Brubeck albums and joke about jazzmaxxing their record collections. They beachmaxx on vacations and cozymaxx under voluminous blankets. Bears prepare for hibernation by salmonmaxxing. There’s a minor meme about a lifestyle of espresso and wine and impossibly long lunches — Europemaxxing. …
Articles offer advice about things like booksmaxxing (which is just reading) and sleepmaxxing (which blends questionable bedtime hacks with basic sleep-hygiene stuff that doctors have been saying for years). The suffix can still capture real strategic choices (like a congressional candidate going all-in on MAGAmaxxing) and it’s hilariously useful for eye-rolling the motives behind them (bribemaxxing, chaosmaxxing)
Maybe, Abebe observed, a little vocabularymaxxing was called for.
The new -maxxings
Abebe’s list would seem to be exhaustive, but neologism-maxxing knows no maximums. A few of the newer -maxxings I’ve clocked:
Tokenmaxxing
“The practice of maximizing one’s AI usage, specifically by consuming as many tokens as possible with autonomous agents. This has emerged as a workplace trend in some corners of the tech industry, with ultra-high AI utilization being treated as a signal of productivity, regardless of the output.” (BuiltIn, April 22, 2026) A “token” is “the atomic unit of A.I. use, roughly equivalent to a word fragment” (New York Times, March 30, 2026).
Kidmaxxing
Siring lots of children. Applies only to ultra-rich men (never women). “The capacity to alchemize money and sperm in this manner has turned an ordinary and beautiful event, the creation of a child, into a kind of acquisition frenzy.” (“Is Kidmaxxing the Ultimate Status Symbol for Ultimate Wealth?” Guest essay by Anna Louise Sussman, New York Times, July 1, 2026)
Meltmaxxing
A TikTok trend in which “people try to make themselves look ‘melted’ by incrementally tucking their chin in more and more while pulling a droopy facial expression.” (“What Is Meltmaxxing?” WikiHow, February 10, 2026)
Reaganmaxxing
“Prospective 2028 presidential candidates are proposing major tax cuts. They belong to a different party than you might expect.” (Joe Perticone, “Are Democrats Reaganmaxxing?” The Bulwark, March 10, 2026)
Flaxxenmaxxing
“The musical practice of playing ‘Debussy-style planing,’ a technique where chords move in parallel motion without resolving in a traditional classical manner.” The reference is to the Claude Debussy composition “The Girl with Flaxen Hair.” Thanks to Mike Pope for this one (see #7 in the Instagram reel). And no, I can’t explain the double X’s in either part of the word.
Every wordmaxxing
A Bluesky account that does exactly that: “Maxxing every noun from the The Natural Language Toolkit database in alphabetical order. Relies on Profanity Filter by API Ninjas to remove bad words.” As I write this, the account has reached costal groovemaxxing and costal cartilagemaxxing.
An old-school Maxx
TJ Maxx (TK Maxx in Australia and Europe) is the OG Maxx, trademark-wise. The discount department-store chain was founded by Bernard Cammarata in 1977 and has more than 4,500 stores in nine countries. If there’s an explanation for any part of the company names, I’ve been unable to find it. And I’ve tried.3
The trademark field is getting crowded
I counted more than 500 MAXX trademarks, registered and pending, in the USPTO database. Here’s a sampling:
And there are at least 20 MAXXING trademarks as well, all submitted since January 2026:
My advice to any brand seeking distinctiveness (as one should): Make minimal use of MAXX and MAXXING.
To the max!
When and where did we start using the adverbial phrase to the max? In the early 1970s in Southern California, according to Jonathon GREEN’s Green’s Dictionary of Slang, which attributes the phrase to “youth cultures.” GDoS’s earliest citation, however, is from drug culture. In Dealer: Portrait of a Cocaine Merchant (1971), Richard Woodley wrote: “See, that’s the whole gimmick. You gotta be willing to take it to the max.” SoCal surf culture may have played a role, too: Surfers talked of waves “maxing out” at specific heights.
The last word(s)?
I’ll hand the mic to Jeremy Gordon:
Maxx plus slop! I don’t know what it means, but I admire it.
For more on mogged, with a bit on looksmaxxing, see my January 12, 2026, word of the week.
In a brief essay for American Speech (May 2025, paywalled), Mark Peters wrote about testosterone-maxxing, flights-maxxing, and positive-maxxing, and added: “With examples like that, it shows -maxxing can refer to virtually any form of making the most of something. Other one-offs found in the wild are nostalgia-maxxing, buzzword-maxxing, vocabulary-maxxing, malaise-maxxing, Debussy-maxxing, aura-maxxing, racism-maxxing, nap-maxxing, and follow-up-maxxing.”
It’s “TK Maxx” in Europe and Australia because of a conflict with another discount chain there, T.J. Hughes.
According to the rules of internet discussions, this trend should end when we reach Hitlermaxxing.
Just moments after reading this, I heard our idiot president say about Air Force One, "It has a lot of capabilities but, as I understand it, in about a month or so they're going to send it to have it be maxed out." Then he said the same thing again, in basically the same idiotic words.