In recent months, Jennifer Lawrence, World Series baseball fans, and right-wing influencers have confessed as much. And now, the people behind the Oxford English Dictionary are jumping on the bandwagon too.
Oxford University Press has chosen “rage bait” — defined as “online content deliberately created to provoke anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative or offensive” — as its 2025 Word of the Year.
“Rage bait,” which beat out more optimistic terms like “biohack” and “aura farming,” dates back to at least 2002, when it appeared in a post on a Usenet discussion group to describe a specific type of driver reaction to being “flashed” by another driver trying to overtake. Since then, it has become an increasingly common slang term for attention-seeking behavior online.
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In the last year, according to data from Oxford, the frequency of use has increased three times. The word made up of two syllables has a direct impact. It also provokes an immediate “aha”.
“Even if people have never heard it before, they instantly know what it means,” said Casper Grathwohl, president of Oxford Languages, in an interview.
The Oxford Word of the Year, which began in 2004, is based on usage evidence drawn from a continually updated corpus of around 30 billion words, 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 recent years, Oxford experts chose a short list and invited the public to give their views. This year, there was something new: the terms were transformed into personified candidates, who presented themselves in fashionable vertical videos, produced by the creative studio Uncommon. (Sample presentation: “What rage bait lacks in empathy, nuance, or class, it makes up for absolutely nothing.”)
The winner was chosen by the Oxford committee, based on voting (more than 30,000 people participated), public conversation and data analysis.
“The goal of Word of the Year is to encourage people to reflect on where we are as a culture, who we are right now, through the words we use,” said Grathwohl. “The main point is to create conversation.”
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Over the years, previous winners include “selfie” (2013), “post-truth” (2016), “toxic” (2018) and “vax” (2021).
c.2025 The New York Times Company
