Over the past few months, 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 into 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 behavior.
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,” Casper Grathwohl, the president of Oxford Languages, said in an interview. “And they want to talk about it.”
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 short list, and then invited the public to weigh in. This year, there was a new twist: The entries were turned into personified candidates, who sold themselves in on-trend vertical videos by the creative studio Uncommon. (Sample pitch: “What rage bait lacks in empathy, nuance or class they make up for in absolutely nothing.”)
The winner was chosen by Oxford’s committee, based on the vote (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,” 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). In the past few years, they have tended to have a distinctly Gen Z, very-online cast.
Some winners, like 2023’s “rizz” (short for “charisma”) give a zingy new name to a familiar thing. “It’s sometimes about the intangible pleasure of saying and speaking a word,” Grathwohl said.
Others, like the 2024 winner, “brain rot” (the supposed deterioration of mental capacity brought on by overconsumption of trivial online content), describe a new experience that many are feeling without knowing what to call it. And whether or not “brain rot” is real, the word is still going strong, with usage continuing to surge.
This year’s finalists, Grathwohl said, reflect the ways that 2025 has been defined by “questions about who we really are, both online and offline,” and the ways the internet both manipulates us emotionally, and allows us to manipulate others.
“Aura farming,” defined as the careful “cultivation of an impressive, attractive or charismatic persona or personality,” arose around 2023, according to Oxford’s research. Usage nearly doubled over the past year, spiking in July in connection with a viral video of a young boy in Indonesia doing a motivational dance on the prow of a racing boat.
Linguistically, it merges a somewhat mystical Latin borrowing, aura, with a 15th-century word relating to the cultivation of crops. “What I love is the banal and the sublime put together,” Grathwohl said.
“Biohack,” a verb describing attempts to “improve or optimize one’s physical or mental performance, health, longevity or well-being,” was first recorded around 2011. Its usage also doubled in the past year, aided by growing conversation among “broligarchs,” as Grathwohl put it, and other powerful people. (He noted an incident in September, when Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping were caught on a hot mic talking about organ transplants and the possibility of living to 150.)
“Rage bait” appeared in the headlines in early November after Jennifer Lawrence confessed to creating an anonymous TikTok handle so she could fight with movie fans online. And it’s something even lexicographers have been accused of peddling.
In 2015, when Oxford chose the tears-of-joy emoji, some old-school wordniks were … not happy.
“People feel so passionately, there’s no way to avoid rage-baiting a portion of the word-loving public,” Grathwohl said. “No matter what we choose, a bunch of people are going to flame out online.”
Jennifer Schuessler is a reporter for the Culture section of The Times who covers intellectual life and the world of ideas.
The post The Oxford 2025 Word of the Year Is ‘Rage Bait’ appeared first on New York Times.
