‘Rage bait’ – word of the year 2025

It’s been a year of “deliberate agitation.” Witness Oxford University Press’ announcement that rage bait was Word of the Year.

Compare with last year’s word brain rot: “outrage sparks engagement, algorithms amplify it, and constant exposure leaves us mentally exhausted.”

Eliciting anger grabs attention, offers personal gain, promotes political sway – all in a marketplace of bad faith, manipulative tactics, emotional hijacking. Yeah, words have consequences.

Which elicits the broader question: Is this who we truly are? Is this the type of society we want? Is this venal drift sustainable?

• Oxford University Press > The Oxford Word of the Year 2025 is rage bait (December 1, 2025) – The word has tripled in usage in the last 12 months

The Oxford Word of the Year can be a singular word or expression, which our lexicographers think of as a single unit of meaning.

Our language experts shortlisted three contenders – rage bait, aura farming, and biohack – that reflect our conversations and preoccupations over the past year. After three days of voting in which more than 30,000 people had their say, our experts chose rage bait after considering votes, the sentiment of public commentary, and their analysis of our lexical data.

Why rage bait?

Rage bait is defined as “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”.

With 2025’s news cycle dominated by social unrest, debates about the regulation of online content, and concerns over digital wellbeing, our experts noticed that the use of rage bait this year has evolved to signal a deeper shift in how we talk about attention – both how it is given and how it is sought after – engagement, and ethics online. The word has tripled in usage in the last 12 months.

Related terms

  • Clickbait
  • Resonance
  • Influencer
  • Troll
  • Edgelord
  • False consensus effect
  • Pluralistic ignorance

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1 comment

  1. Scrabble slop

    So, like Oxford University Press, Merriam-Webster also announced a word of the year: ‘slop‘.

    Other contenders were: gerrymander, touch grass, performative, tariff, six-seven, conclave, and Lake Char­gog­ga­gogg­man­chaug­ga­gogg­chau­bu­na­gun­ga­maugg.

    • Merriam Webster > 2025 Word of the Year: Slop (Dec 14, 2025)

    Merriam-Webster’s human editors have chosen slop as the 2025 Word of the Year. We define slop as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.” All that stuff dumped on our screens, captured in just four letters: the English language came through again.

    Like slime, sludge, and muck, slop has the wet sound of something you don’t want to touch. Slop oozes into everything. The original sense of the word, in the 1700s, was “soft mud.” In the 1800s it came to mean “food waste” (as in “pig slop”), and then more generally, “rubbish” or “a product of little or no value.”

    Mopping up slop

    Other references

    • PC World > Merriam-Webster names ‘slop’ the word of the year as AI overwhelms the Web by Alaina Yee, Senior Editor (Dec 17, 2025) – Dictionaries also capture the social zeitgeist of the time.

    In summary:

    Merriam-Webster selected ‘slop‘ as its 2025 Word of the Year, defining it as low-quality AI-generated digital content that increasingly floods the internet.

    PCWorld reports this AI-related definition now serves as the primary meaning in the dictionary, beating contenders like ‘gerrymander’ and ‘touch grass’.

    This linguistic shift reflects growing concerns about artificial intelligence’s impact on digital content quality and demonstrates how technology trends shape modern language evolution.

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