Meh

The OED dates meh as an interjection back to 1992, in an internet newsgroup, and as an adjective back to 2007 in The Guardian:

The man could scarcely walk. Two hours later he was cheerfully high-kicking a suicide bomber out the back of a train. Nuts. But somehow it all seemed, to use a bit of internet parlance, a bit ‘meh’.

But this bit of "internet parlance" has started showing up in news headlines, without excuses or scare quotes, and not just in places like college papers.

Some examples:

"The Meh Tax Bill That Has to Pass", WSJ 7/1/2025

"I Tried This $40 Smartwatch: It Was Meh, but Not a Complete Waste of Time", CNET 7/202025

"‘Not dire, not amazing, more meh’: Job market cools as quits plummet in stagnant labor picture", Fortune 7/29/2025

"Gerrymandering? Meh", National Review 8/6/2025

"2025 Minnesota State Fair's new food items ranked, from best to … meh", CBS News 8/29/2025

"If American films are meh…are China’s better?", NPR 10/6/2025

"Gemini’s IPO Was Meh. But Wall Street Still Likes the Crypto Firm.", Barron's 10/7/2025.

Some outlets are still using scare quotes, though we can expect that to end before long:

"AI gets more 'meh' as you get to know it better, researchers discover", The Register 10/8/2025

"How ‘Meh’ AI Could Cost Companies More Than It Saves", Bloomberg 10/11/225

"The Real AI Risk is ‘Meh’ Technology That Takes Jobs and Annoys Us All", Bloomberg 10/12/2025

There are even headlines with clever meh-based wordplay:

"‘F1: THE MOVIE’ Review: Brad Pitt’s ‘TOP GUN: Meh-VERICK’", Fresh Fiction 6/17/2025

"On nostalgia: No country for old meh!" Shots Magazine 9/29/2025

"Fears for depressed turnout in the 2025 Calgary meh-lection", CBC 10/12/2025

So meh joins a list of words that start out as conventional (though variable) spellings of  (what some linguists call) "non-speech vocalizations". First used in text as interjections, they then evolve into nouns and adjectives, sometimes with various morphological extensions. Here are  few examples, some of which go back to Old English and beyond:

ick, icky, … ew ugh yuck, yucks wow, wowee, wowsers, .. whew whoa ha, haha, hoho, … uh, um, eh, er, … foo, phooey, pfui, … mm-hmm, uh-uh, …

There are some corners of this space that have their own set of morpho-semantic patterns, as discussed in "mmhmm etc." 8/18/2018, and "Hummed 'I don't know'", 8/29/2021.

There are also some interesting syntactic details. For example, there's been wide adoption of "(get) the ick" (e.g. here and here) — but I've never seen similar uses of "the meh", and I'm not expecting to.