'Rage bait' named Oxford word of the year 2025
If scrolling through your social media feed, do you get more irate? If so, you may be falling victim to rage bait, which Oxford University Press has named its year-long term or phrase of the year. According to the dictionary publisher, it's a term that refers to manipulative tactics used to drive online engagement, with the usage of the word increasing threefold in the last 12 months. Rage bait took the title after beating two other shortlisted terms - aura farming and biohack.
The list of words is intended to represent some of the moods and discussions that have influenced 2025.
What is rage bait?
And if you don't know the word, if your account is a social media poster, it's likely you have been rage baited. It is described as online material intentionally designed to incite indignation or shame, according to Oxford University Press, which publishes the Oxford English Dictionary. It is also called online material that is instructive, provocative, or offensive. Such material is often posted in order to drive website or social media pages in order. It is similar to its internet cousin clickbait, in which a headline is used to compel a visitor to open an or video. However, rage bait material has a more definite focus on bringing people cross.
What do the other shortlisted words mean?
The three shortlisted words were subjected to a public vote, the results of which helped guide the final decision taken by OUP's language experts.
Casper Grathwohl, president of Oxford Languages.The fact that rage bait exists and has seen such a drastic increase in usage shows we're increasingly aware of the manipulation tactics we can be drawn into online,
It seems that it's the natural progression in an ongoing debate about what it means to be human in a tech-driven world and the extremes of online culture.Before, the internet was focused on grabbing our attention by in exchange for clicks, but now we've seen a dramatic change in it hijacking and infringing our emotions, as well as how we react.
They create a powerful cycle in which passion ignites passion, algorithms enhance it, and constant exposure leaves us physically exhausted," he said. The year's best Oxford words include selfies, goblin mode, and rizz. The Cambridge Dictionary has selected Paraphrasedword 2025 as a result of a friendship between a person and a well-known celebrity that they do not know. Its examples include the admiration shown by followers as pop star Taylor Swift and American footballer Travis Kelce announced their engagement. In the meantime, Collins Dictionary continued to endorse coding, which is the art of building an app or website, by referring to artificial intelligence rather than manually writing program code. Get all the headlines you need to start the day with our flagship newsletter. Sign up here.The word of the year, brain rot, captured the mental exhaustion of mindless scrolling on Instagram or TikTok. Both 2024 and 2025's winners, according to Mr Grathwohl, have a common theme.
