It seems I now have justification and reasonable explanation for my feelings of rage. There I was blaming my hormones, but the lovely people at Oxford University Press have a word for it – rage bait.
It is just one of the words of 2025 where unsurprisingly, artificial intelligence and our increasingly fraught relationship with social media are at the heart of it.
Just two years ago, I was marvelling at how ‘authentic’ became Merriam-Webster’s word of the year, a response to our world of deepfakes and disingenuity. Now? We’re drowning in something called ‘AI slop’ – and that’s not me being dramatic, that’s Macquarie Dictionary’s official word of the year for 2025.
The term refers to the low-quality content churned out by generative AI, often riddled with errors and appearing uninvited in our feeds and search results. Technology experts warn it’s “making its way upstream into people’s media diets,” which is a polite way of saying we’re all consuming more rubbish than ever before – except now it’s AI-generated rubbish.
And if AI slop describes what we’re consuming, ‘rage bait’ captures exactly how we’re being manipulated to consume it. Oxford defines it as “online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive.” According to the experts, rage bait has tripled in usage over the past year. It’s the evolution of clickbait – but instead of just grabbing our attention, it’s now hijacking our emotions.
As Casper Grathwohl, President of Oxford Languages, explains: “Where last year’s choice, brain rot, captured the mental drain of endless scrolling, rage bait shines a light on the content purposefully engineered to spark outrage and drive clicks.” Together, they form a vicious cycle where outrage sparks engagement, algorithms amplify it and constant exposure leaves us mentally exhausted.
It seems the dictionaries are united in their focus on our increasingly complicated relationship with technology. While Cambridge Dictionary has gone with ‘parasocial’ – first used academically in 1956 – they’ve expanded its meaning beyond our obsessions with celebrities and influencers. Now it encompasses the one-sided relationships people are forming with AI chatbots. Because apparently, we weren’t content just parasocially bonding with reality TV stars; we had to start developing feelings for computers too.
Professor Simone Schnall from the University of Cambridge called it “the perfect word of the year,” noting how parasocial relationships have “redefined fandom, celebrity and, with AI, how ordinary people interact online.” It’s slightly unsettling when you think about it – we’re living in a world where people are forming genuine emotional connections with programs.
Then there’s Collins Dictionary’s choice, ‘vibe coding’, which is essentially telling a computer what you want in plain English and having AI translate that into actual code. As Collins puts it, you’re “telling a machine what you want rather than painstakingly coding it yourself.” Gone are the days when you needed to understand programming languages – now you just need to explain your vibe and AI does the rest.
But perhaps the most baffling entry comes from Dictionary.com, which has crowned ‘6-7’ as its word of the year. Except it’s not really a word. Or two words. It’s… well, nobody seems entirely sure what it is. This viral term exploded over the summer among kids and teenagers, who found it absolutely hilarious, while parents and teachers stood by looking utterly bewildered. Even Dictionary.com admits they’re “all still trying to figure out exactly what it means.”
The last time I wrote a blog on words of the year was back in 2023. Rizz and beige flag were on that list and at least we could define them, even if Tom Holland insisted he had no rizz whatsoever. Now words of the year are either describing the mess AI is making of our information ecosystem, how we’re being manipulated online, or are completely unintelligible to anyone over 18.
The evolution continues at breakneck speed. Where Shakespeare gave us new words through poetry and drama, we’re now getting them from AI errors, algorithmic manipulation and inexplicable teenage TikTok trends. We’ve moved from 5,400 new words created annually to a point where the boundary between human and machine-generated language is increasingly blurred.
What strikes me most is the tension captured in these words. We’re simultaneously empowered by AI (vibe coding) and overwhelmed by it (AI slop). We’re being deliberately provoked to rage for clicks and engagement (rage bait) while forming one-sided relationships with technology (parasocial with chatbots), all while struggling to connect with each other (6-7 being an inside joke nobody can explain). Language has always reflected the times we live in, but 2025’s words reveal a society grappling with the very nature of communication itself – and questioning who’s really in control.
So here’s to 2025 – the year AI got sloppy, coding got vibes, rage became a business model, our relationships got even more one-sided and teenagers left us all thoroughly confused (about the only thing that hasn’t changed). Whether we’re ready for it or not, language continues its relentless evolution. And this time, we’re not even sure who’s doing the evolving – us or the machines.
At least nobody can accuse this year’s words of being a beige flag.
