Rage Bait Is Oxford’s 2025 Word of the Year, Because Outrage Now Runs the Internet
Key Highlights
- Oxford chooses “rage bait” as 2025 Word of the Year amid rising concerns over how platforms profit from outrage.
- Engagement-driven algorithms on TikTok, X and YouTube amplify provocative content because anger keeps users hooked.
- “Aura farming” and “biohack” were also on the shortlist.
In a year defined by debates over digital toxicity and platform accountability, Oxford University Press has selected “rage bait” as its 2025 Word of the Year, a choice that reflects how deeply the online economy now depends on emotion, particularly negative emotion.
Anger Has Become the Internet’s Most Valuable Currency
Across TikTok, YouTube and X, posts that ignite fury routinely outperform feel-good content. It’s a system shaped not by accident but by design: engagement-based algorithms reward anything that generates comments, stitches, duels, debates or backlash. In this environment, anger is an asset and rage bait is the packaging.
Rage bait refers to content deliberately crafted to provoke outrage, encouraging users to react, share or argue, pushing posts further up algorithmic rankings. Oxford says the term has surged in use over the past year, mirroring a public that is increasingly aware of how easily online emotions are manipulated.
Casper Grathwohl, president of Oxford Languages, said the rise of the term signals “a growing cultural awareness of how our attention can be steered, sparked and exploited”, a shift that journalists, researchers and regulators have been warning about for years.
How Rage Bait Became a Feature, Not a Bug
The mechanics behind the trend are straightforward: the more heated the reaction, the more the platform assumes a post is “high-value.” That makes outrage a kind of algorithmic gold.
On TikTok, provocative clips trigger stitched rebuttals and commentary chains. On X, quote-tweets and dunking matches propel posts into trending topics. YouTube’s recommendation engine prioritises videos that spark strong emotional responses, creating long chains of reaction videos.
This incentive structure fuels what researchers call the “outrage economy”, a system in which creators who spark conflict gain visibility, followers, and in many cases, monetisation. It has also enabled the rise of rage farming, a strategy where accounts repeatedly post inflammatory content to maintain high engagement numbers, sometimes relying on misinformation or low-context clips.
The net effect: anger becomes a growth hack, and platforms benefit every time users fall for it.
What Rage Bait Beat Out: Aura Farming and Biohack
Oxford also shortlisted “aura farming” and “biohack,” reflecting two other major cultural trends that shaped 2025.
Aura Farming: A term popularised on social platforms to describe the art of crafting a magnetic or mysterious online persona. As creators lean into curated aesthetics and “main character energy,” aura farming reflects how digital identity has become a form of performance.
Biohack: A word that captures the booming interest in self-optimisation from supplement routines to cold plunges to wearable tech. As wellness culture merges with Silicon Valley, biohacking has surged across Gen Z and millennial circles.
Both terms highlight the same underlying tension as rage bait: the internet is reshaping behaviour, self-presentation and even health choices with unprecedented influence.
How Oxford Picks Its Word of the Year
Oxford lexicographers analyse data from their global English corpus to identify spikes in usage, cultural resonance and linguistic longevity. The 2025 shortlist was opened to a public vote on Instagram, after which experts reviewed data, commentary and global events before finalising the winner.
What Other Dictionaries Chose in 2025
Cambridge Dictionary named “parasocial” as its Word of the Year, emphasising the emotional dependence many users feel toward creators they have never met.
Collins Dictionary opted for “vibe coding,” a phrase describing how developers increasingly build apps by explaining them to AI rather than writing code manually.
Looking Back: Oxford’s 2024 Winner
In 2024, the Word of the Year was “brain rot,” a term that captured widespread burnout and cognitive exhaustion linked to an endless scrolling and consumption of trivial content. Previous winners include selfie, rizz and goblin mode, words that track cultural shifts in how people communicate online.
Rage bait, however, is different: it points not just to how people talk, but to how the internet itself is engineered.
