As years come to a close, dictionaries use their status as arbiters of language to make some kind of definitive case for the single word that summed up the previous 12 months. The word chosen isn’t necessarily the most relevant word of the year.
The honor usually goes to a word that did something novel, which, given that Oxford’s 2025 Word of the Year is “rage bait,” is pretty funny considering that writing stuff for the express purpose of pissing someone off is one of humanity’s oldest traits. All the internet did was create a word to describe it.
Defined as online content engineered to provoke anger, the specific pairing of the words rage and bait has been around since around 2002. The act it describes, however, has existed practically since the first fish that would one day become human flopped on shore, and then another fish wrote a spiteful screed about it, explicitly designed to divert attention to him and away from the fish that changed the course of the planet’s history.
Oxford’s data shows the term tripled in frequency over the past year, a surge fueled by viral rage-inducing posts from the usual constellation of people we can generously call provocateurs, though “assholes” is probably a more fitting description.
Casper Grathwohl, president of Oxford Languages, notes that people recognize the term intuitively and want to talk about it, sometimes angrily, like I’m doing now, which only proves the point.
Oxford’s selection process combined big-data linguistics with an online public vote. For 2025, they added a new twist in the form of personified Word-of-the-Year candidates campaigning through short-form, TikTok and Reels-ready videos.
The video for rage bait, which you can watch below, features a man wearing a series of rubber animal masks to conceal his identity as he says things explicitly and exclusively designed to rile people up.
It’s cute and accurate, though this is a dictionary’s social media account, so they have to go with the comparatively cuter and family-friendly examples. If you want to get into the real nitty-gritty of rage bait, all you have to do is spend two seconds on Twitter to see the real, primo rage bait posts, which are often rooted in a bouquet of bigotries and sprinkled with a colorful array of slurs that reveal more about the bizarre insecurities of the people using them than the people they’re used against.
Another 2025 finalist that exists in the same realm as rage bait was “aura farming,” which describes the art of meticulously cultivating a persona that you think will make you better liked, presumably because the real you is a detestable shithead.
The post Oxford Chooses ‘Rage Bait’ as the 2025 Word of the Year appeared first on VICE.
