Five days after Dictionary.com made “maxxing” its 2026 Word of the Year, the suffix found its seasonal form.
On Thursday at 14:32 UTC, Sohrab Ahmari, US editor of UnHerd, posted two videos of his children’s costumes with one sentence: “Once again, my wife spent the past month Halloween-maxxing so our kids could homemade-costume-mog.”
Two slang terms, one sentence, one wife doing the work.
The numbers
- The post: 342,181 views, 10,012 likes, 803 reposts and 625 bookmarks by Saturday morning.
- Posts containing “halloweenmaxxing”, “halloween maxxing” or “halloween-maxxing”: 9 on Wednesday, 50 on Thursday, 670 on Friday. That is 74 times Wednesday’s count.
- The related forms stayed flat: “spookymaxxing”, “candymaxxing” and “costumemaxxing” combined ran between 78 and 132 a day all week.
Who’s doing it
The term spread well beyond the original family. Chicago radio station Q101 used it to thank drivers decorating their cars (“Know who appreciates you Halloween-maxxing the most? The ones getting whipped by plastic spiders flying off your car at 80 mph on the Kennedy”). A streamer announced “HALLOWEEN MAXXING ‼️‼️” while assembling Pokémon card tins for trick-or-treaters. Another user admitted to a childhood strategy of hitting multiple neighborhoods with a wheeled hockey bag and reselling the candy a month later.
The best reply to Ahmari came from a parenting account: “Halloween-maxxing for a month just to be outdone by a kid in a $12 inflatable costume is elite commitment to the bit.”
Mog season
“Mog” now covers costumes, which means the looksmaxxing hierarchy has reached the age bracket that still trick-or-treats. The homemade side has the month of work. The inflatable side has the $12. Tonight, the doorbell decides.
GetMaxxing does not rank children’s costumes. All of them are winning.