After three days of online voting by more than 30,000 people, Oxford University Press has declared ‘rage bait’ its 2025 Word of the Year, beating shortlist rivals ‘aura farming’ and ‘biohack’. Oxford Languages defines ‘rage bait’ as online material deliberately designed to provoke anger or outrage—frustrating, provocative, or offensive content posted to drive traffic and engagement. If a piece of internet content produces a deliberately charged, negative emotional reaction, it typically qualifies as rage bait.
Casper Grathwohl, president of Oxford Languages, says the term reflects a shift in how online attention is captured: where the web once relied on curiosity-driven clicks, it now too often hijacks emotions to influence our responses. The phrase gained added visibility this year after actress Jennifer Lawrence revealed she keeps a secret TikTok account she uses to ‘get in fights’ with strangers, an example Oxford cites of how people and platforms can stoke outrage.
Oxford calls rage bait ‘the internet’s most effective hook’ and frames 2025 as a year in which technology increasingly seeps into people’s minds and feelings—pointing to deepfake celebrities, AI-generated influencers, virtual companions and even the potential for chatbots to act as, or provoke, rage bait. Rising social unrest and growing concern for digital wellbeing also contributed to a spike in the term’s usage this year, Oxford’s language experts say, noting that many media trends reward outrage with engagement.
For public input, Oxford again used social media, running an Instagram campaign that personified its three shortlisted words. ‘Rage bait’ was depicted as an anonymous figure in an alien-like lizard mask with the deliberately misspelled blurb ‘I’m glad your mad!’ ‘Biohack’ appeared as a robotic, green-juice–drinking woman asking ‘have you ever tried to edit your lifespan?’—played by London-based actor and model Brenda Finn. ‘Aura farming,’ defined as cultivating an attractive or charismatic public persona, was shown as a stylish influencer with a whimsical to-do list including banning fluorescent lighting, establishing a universal basic income for microinfluencers, and teaching people to ride a bike without hands.
Is it any surprise, Oxford asks, that last year’s Word of the Year was ‘brainrot’?