“Rage bait”, a term describing online content designed to provoke anger and drive internet traffic, has been crowned the word of the year for 2025, Oxford University Press (OUP) announced on Monday. It beat other shortlisted contenders ‘aura farming’ and ‘biohack’.
Oxford University Press said the “rage bait” – selected through a combination of public voting, sentiment and OUP’s “lexical data” analysis – “captured our emotions” this year. Citing its language monitoring data, the OUP also said use of the word had tripled in the past 12 months.
Casper Grathwohl, president of OUP’s language division, said the growing use of such words “reveals how digital platforms are reshaping our thinking and behavior,” AFP reported.
“It feels like a natural progression in the ongoing conversation about what it means to be human in a world driven by technology — and the extremes of online culture,” he added in a statement.
“Rage bait” vs “aura farming” vs “biohack”
The bait Rage beat out its competitors “aura farming” and “biohack” to earn Oxford Word of 2025 status.
“Aura farming” means “cultivating an impressive, attractive, or charismatic personality or public image by behaving or presenting yourself in a way that is intended to subtly convey an air of confidence, coolness, or mystique.”
Biohacking is an attempt to “enhance or optimize one’s physical or mental performance, health, longevity, or well-being by changing diet, exercise, or lifestyle, or by other means such as drugs, supplements, or technological devices.”
How was the word “rage” chosen as the word of the year?
More than 30,000 people worldwide voted over three days for their preferred winner, according to OUP.
Its final choice was also supported by evidence of “actual language use” after its experts tracked the use of shortlisted words through a “30 billion word global language data corpus” over the course of a year.
It is the fourth year in a row that the public has played a role in choosing Oxford’s word of the year, after “goblin mode” won the inaugural public vote in 2022.
In that case, the public was given the chance to pick an overall winner, choosing a term describing behavior that was “unconditionally self-indulgent, lazy, careless or greedy”.
In subsequent years, voting only played a role in elections that included 2023’s “rizz” – a colloquial term defined as “style, charm or appeal” – and last year’s “brain rot”.
Previous words of the year chosen exclusively by Oxford lexicographers include “vax” (2021), “climate emergency” (2019) and “selfie” (2013).
