‘Rage Bait,’ Which Describes Online Content Created to Make Us Mad, Is Oxford’s 2025 Word of the Year
The term “has become shorthand for content designed to elicit anger by being frustrating, offensive or deliberately divisive in nature,” according to experts
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Have you ever been scrolling on social media only to come across content that seems like it was engineered to make you angry?
If the answer is yes, you may have fallen victim to “rage bait,” which Oxford University Press, the publisher of the Oxford English Dictionary, just named as its word of the year.
Defined as online content intentionally designed to elicit anger in order to increase web traffic, “rage bait” cemented its place as Oxford’s word of the year following a public vote and lexical data analysis. Usage of the term tripled throughout 2025, the press found.
“The fact that the word ‘rage bait’ exists and has seen such a dramatic surge in usage means we’re increasingly aware of the manipulation tactics we can be drawn into online,” Casper Grathwohl, the president of Oxford Languages, says in a statement. “Before, the internet was focused on grabbing our attention by sparking curiosity in exchange for clicks, but now we’ve seen a dramatic shift to it hijacking and influencing our emotions.”
While both “rage” and “bait” have been used since the Middle Ages, “rage bait” was first coined in 2002 in a Usenet post to describe the kind of reaction a driver might have to being flashed by another driver requesting to pass them. Since then, it’s been taken up by social media users to describe viral posts that are designed to provoke outrage. It’s a cousin of “clickbait,” which refers to sensationalized headlines and content designed to grab attention. A sustained “rage bait” tactic is sometimes known as “rage-farming.”
Quick fact: How many words are in the Oxford English Dictionary?
The dictionary features “500,000 words and phrases past and present, from across the English-speaking world,” according to its website.“Even if people have never heard it before, they instantly know what it means,” Grathwohl tells the New York Times’ Jennifer Schuessler. “And they want to talk about it.”
Last month, actress Jennifer Lawrence said she was “rage baiting” after admitting to using an anonymous TikTok account to argue about pop culture in the comments. “Rage bait” can come in the form of ridiculous food recipes, celebrity slander and artificial intelligence-generated slop. Some influencers have built their entire careers around “rage baiting,” BBC News’ Sam Gruet and Megan Lawton reported in 2024, grabbing views by posting ridiculous, anger-inducing content.
“If we see a cat, we’re like ‘Oh, that’s cute’ and scroll on,” marketing podcaster Andréa Jones told BBC News. “But if we see someone doing something obscene, we may type in the comments ‘This is terrible,’ and that sort of comment is seen as a higher quality engagement by the algorithm.”
It’s the second year in a row that Oxford University Press selected a word related to the uglier aspects of being online. Last year’s winner was “brain rot,” which describes the mind-numbing effect of spending too much time on the internet.
“Together, [‘rage bait’ and ‘brain rot’] form a powerful cycle where outrage sparks engagement, algorithms amplify it, and constant exposure leaves us mentally exhausted,” Grathwohl says in the statement.
Rounding out the 2025 word of the year shortlist were “aura farming,” a viral term that refers to cultivating the coolest version of yourself, and “biohack,” a verb that means trying to optimize one’s physical or mental performance, often through methods like taking supplements or cold plunging.
For more than two decades, Oxford University Press has selected words of the year in an attempt to capture the cultural moment of the preceding 12 months. Some selections, like “podcast” (2005) and “selfie” (2013), have gone on to prove their staying power. Others, like “goblin mode” (2022) and “youthquake” (2017), haven’t quite maintained the cultural relevance they once had.
“The point of the Word of the Year is to encourage people to reflect on where we are as a culture, who we are at the moment, through the lens of words we use,” Grathwohl tells the Times. “The whole point is to create conversation.”
Since 2022, the publisher has opened up its word selection to the public, inviting people to vote for their favorite word from a shortlist. This year, more than 30,000 people cast their votes for “rage bait,” “biohack” or “aura farming.” On Instagram, Oxford University Press shared spoof videos in which each word “campaigns” for itself, such as a soft-spoken man in a cardigan preparing matcha who introduced himself as “aura farming.”
Oxford isn’t the only dictionary that declares an annual word. For Cambridge Dictionary, 2025’s word was “parasocial,” which describes the one-way relationship a fan develops with a celebrity or influencer. Collins Dictionary declared “vibe coding,” which describes coding that heavily relies on A.I. assistance, as its word of the year. Dictionary.com’s pick was “67”—a term that has no definition at all.