If you’ve ever stumbled upon a post that feels a little too good at being infuriating, but you interact with it anyway, then you have just been “rage baited”.
On Monday, the Oxford University Press (OUP) declared “rage bait” as the 2025 word of the year.
It refers to posts that are purposely designed to provoke anger so that the audience will be compelled to click, comment, argue or watch, just to boost engagement.
Rage bait, aura farm, biohack: the 2025 mood board
In a report by Agence France-Presse, Oxford defined rage bait as “online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, typically posted.”
The word won via public votes, sentiment tracking and its own lexical analysis, according to Oxford, beating the other slang words “aura farming” and “biohack.”
Aura farming, Oxford said, is “the cultivation of an impressive, attractive, or charismatic persona or public image by behaving or presenting oneself in a way intended subtly to convey an air of confidence, coolness, or mystique.”
While biohacking refers to the efforts people make “to improve or optimise one’s physical or mental performance, health, longevity, or wellbeing by altering one’s diet, exercise routine, or lifestyle, or by using other means such as drugs, supplements, or technological devices.”
Digital lexicon shaping one’s perception
Oxford said that the term had “captured our emotions” this year.
Casper Grathwohl, president of OUP’s languages division, also explained that the increasing use of such terms shows “how digital platforms are reshaping our thinking and behaviour.”
“It feels like the natural progression in an ongoing conversation about what it means to be human in a tech-driven world – and the extremes of online culture,” he said.
The use of the term has risen dramatically this year, which means that internet users are finally aware when “they are being drawn ever more quickly into polarising debates and arguments as a response to social media algorithms and the addictive nature of outrage content,” Oxford added.
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Vocabularies of the digital age
Moreover, “rage bait” got over 30,000 votes in three days.
OUP combined this with data analysis and checked the word’s usage across “a 30-billion-word corpus of global language data.”
Since 2022’s “goblin mode”, rage bait’s win also marks the fourth consecutive year that the public helped pick a winner.
Last year, the word that won was “brain rot”, which refers to online content that is nonsense, low-quality and absurd.
Grathwohl said that together, rage bait and brain rot create “a powerful cycle where outrage sparks engagement, algorithms amplify it, and constant exposure leaves us mentally exhausted.”
“These words don’t just define trends; they reveal how digital platforms are reshaping their thinking and behaviour,” he said, as reported by CNN.
Meanwhile, 2023’s word of the year was “rizz” – defined as “style, charm, or attractiveness.”
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