The Oxford 2025 Word of the Year is ‘rage bait’

NEW YORK – Over the past few months, American actress Jennifer Lawrence, World Series fans and right-wing influencers have all confessed to it. And now, the people behind the Oxford English Dictionary are getting in on the act.

Oxford University Press has chosen “rage bait” – defined as “online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative or offensive” – as its 2025 Word of the Year.

Rage bait, which triumphed over the more upbeat “biohack” and “aura farming”, goes back at least to 2002, when it appeared in a post on a Usenet discussion group to describe a particular kind of driver reaction to being flashed by another driver seeking to pass.

Since then, it has become an increasingly common slang term for an attention-seeking form of online behaviour.

Over the past year, according to Oxford’s data, frequency of use spiked by a factor of three. The two-syllable open-compound word lands with blunt force. It also sparks an immediate “aha”.

“Even if people have never heard it before, they instantly know what it means,” Mr Casper Grathwohl, president of Oxford Languages, said in an interview.

Oxford’s Word of the Year, which began in 2004, is based on usage evidence drawn from its continually updated corpus of some 30 billion words, which is compiled from news sources across the English-speaking world. The idea is to identify new or emerging words with social and cultural significance, backed by data.

As in the past few years, Oxford’s experts chose a shortlist and then invited the public to weigh in.

In 2025, there was a new twist. The entries were turned into personified candidates, who sold themselves in on-trend vertical videos by creative studio Uncommon.

The winner was chosen by Oxford’s committee, based on votes (more than 30,000 people weighed in), public conversation and data analysis.

“The point of the Word of the Year is to encourage people to reflect on where we are as a culture, who we are at the moment, through the lens of words we use,” Mr Grathwohl said. “The whole point is to create conversation.”

Over the years, winners have included “selfie” (2013), “post-truth” (2016), “toxic” (2018) and “vax” (2021). NYTIMES