The wait is over—the official Oxford Word of the Year 2025 is rage bait.
Our language experts shortlisted three contenders—rage bait, aura farming, and biohack—that reflect our conversations and preoccupations over the past year. After three days of voting in which more than 30,000 people had their say, our experts chose rage bait after considering votes, the sentiment of public commentary, and their analysis of our lexical data.
Really? Not Slop, not enshittification? Sigh.
Enshittification has already been word of the year in 2023 and 2024, get with the times old man
Slop makes it hard to filter out what you need. Enshitification ensures everything slowly gets worse.
Ragebait is the primary tool for divide and conquer tactics, which have been absolutely successful at getting different groups to disable communications entirely. Not just the fascist cult, but progressive movements that can’t find a semblance of solidarity, because those other progressives are actually evil. Just look at all of this evidence of vague non contextually robust pieces of framing to be sent into the wild to breed tribal warring.
Try dealing with controlled opposition or other problems, when people are incapable of trying to comprehend when others speak to them.
Rage bait is so 2024. Doomscrolling is the hot new thing.