“Rage bait” edged out “biohack” and “aura farming” to turn into the phrase of the 12 months.
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Take a deep breath and consider your comfortable place: “rage bait” is the 2025 Oxford Word of the Year.
After three days of on-line voting by greater than 30,000 members, Oxford University Press introduced on Monday that “rage bait” is the official decide, beating out fellow shortlist nominees “aura farming” and “biohack.”
Defined as “on-line content material intentionally designed to elicit anger or outrage by being irritating, provocative, or offensive,” rage bait is “usually posted with a purpose to improve site visitors to or engagement with a specific net web page or social media account,” based on Oxford’s definition.
When web content material produces a charged and detrimental emotional response from viewers, whether or not deliberately or not, it probably falls into the class of rage bait.
Oxford weighs in
Before the time period “rage bait” entered the English lexicon round 2002, “the web was centered on grabbing our consideration by sparking curiosity in change for clicks,” says Casper Grathwohl, president of the Oxford Languages division at Oxford University Press. “Now we have seen a dramatic shift to it hijacking and influencing our feelings, and the way we reply.”
In latest months, the phrase gained recognition after actress Jennifer Lawrence revealed that she has a secret TikTok account she makes use of to “get in fights” with strangers on-line.
Oxford calls rage bait “the web’s only hook,” used to stimulate that ever-sensitive feeling of human anger current — although maybe in numerous kinds — inside us all.
This 12 months, says Oxford, “has been a 12 months outlined by the transformation of humanity in a tech-driven world.”
They listing deepfake celebrities, AI-generated influencers, and digital companions as examples of tech seeping into our minds and, notably, our feelings.
Is it potential to be “rage baited” by ChatGPT, or “rage bait” the chatbot itself? Perhaps now greater than ever.
But it is not simply machine-learning applied sciences that may “rage bait” their customers, or vice-versa. General social unrest and issues over “digital wellbeing” prompted utilization of the phrase to spike in 2025, based on Oxford’s language consultants.
“This important improve speaks to a pattern in media typically that rewards rage bait with engagement,” reads the “Why is it in our shortlist?“ Oxford transient for “rage bait.”
Personifying the 2025 shortlist
For the previous few years, Oxford Press has used social media to collect public opinion on its Word of the Year shortlist. This 12 months, they deliberately used their Instagram web page to run a digital marketing campaign for its three shortlisted phrases.
“Rage bait” was personified as an nameless particular person sporting what seems to be an alien-esque lizard masks. “I’m glad your mad!” reads the blurb on its marketing campaign poster, deliberately misspelled.
“Biohack” appeared as a robotic, inexperienced juice-drinking girl who asks viewers, “have you ever ever tried to edit your lifespan?” Played by London-based actor and mannequin Brenda Finn, the personified “biohack” subtly hints at the exploding worldwide recognition of cosmetic surgery and anti-aging regimens.
And “aura farming” — the “cultivation of a powerful, engaging, or charismatic persona or public picture” — appeared as a classy influencer wanting wistfully into the gap. If elected, aura farming’s “to-do listing” contains banning fluorescent lighting, establishing common primary revenue for microinfluencers, and instructing individuals methods to experience a motorbike with out arms: as a result of “no one ought to have to decide on between studying Nineteenth-century poetry and maintaining their steadiness on two wheels.”
Is it any shock that final 12 months’s Word of the Year was “brainrot?”
