‘Rage bait’ named Oxford Word of the Year 2025 – here’s what it means
The official Oxford Word of the Year 2025 is rage bait. (Canva)
The official Oxford Word of the Year 2025 is rage bait. (Canva)
The term “rage bait” has been named 2025’s Oxford Word of the Year.
Many of us know the feeling of increased frustration that comes with scrolling through social media. That feeling is intentionally created and known as rage bait.
The term, which has tripled in usage in the last 12 months, according to the dictionary publisher, refers to “online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, typically posted in order to increase traffic to or engagement with a particular web page or social media content”.
Oxford University Press noted the term was first used “online in a posting on Usenet in 2002 as a way to designate a particular type of driver reaction to being flashed at by another driver requesting to pass them, introducing the idea of deliberate agitation”.
The term beat two other shortlisted items, aura farming and bio hack, to win the title, with a public vote helping to guide the final decision taken by the publisher’s language experts.
‘We’re increasingly aware of the manipulation tactics’
Speaking about this year’s winner, Casper Grathwohl, president of Oxford Languages, said: “As technology and artificial intelligence become ever more embedded into our daily lives — from deepfake celebrities and AI-generated influencers to virtual companions and dating platforms — there’s no denying that 2025 has been a year defined by questions around who we truly are; both online and offline.
“The fact that the word rage bait exists and has seen such a dramatic surge in usage means we’re increasingly aware of the manipulation tactics we can be drawn into online. Before, the internet was focused on grabbing our attention by sparking curiosity in exchange for clicks, but now we’ve seen a dramatic shift to it hijacking and influencing our emotions, and how we respond. It feels like the natural progression in an ongoing conversation about what it means to be human in a tech-driven world — and the extremes of online culture.”
Last year’s Oxford Word of the Year was “brain rot”, which Grathwohl noted “captured the mental drain of endless scrolling, rage bait shines a light on the content purposefully engineered to spark outrage and drive clicks”.
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