‘Rage bait’ has been declared The Oxford University Press 2025 word of the year. Dr Laura Bailey, Senior Lecturer in English Language and Linguistics, explains how these words come into our regular discourse.
‘I love this word,’ Bailey enthuses, ‘And it seems like a perfect word of the year, because dictionaries don’t just pick something that’s newest or most frequent, they pick a word that has some significance or that captures the zeitgeist, something that people feel is relevant to them, right now. That shows us that this word reflects the way that the internet, and particularly social media, is being used to manipulate our emotions and use that reaction to drive engagement for monetising and advertising content.’
Each dictionary picks a different word each year, and this year all words are tech or web related: ‘parasocial’ was chosen by Cambridge, ‘AI slop’ by Macquarie, and ‘vibe coding’ by Collins.
‘It does show us something about how we’re feeling,’ Bailey says, ‘about the way that social media is developing right now. Last year’s word of the year was ‘Doomscrolling’, which embodied the idea of us just scrolling endlessly and relates to our consumption of the internet, and perhaps specifically social media consumption.
‘However, how new words develop and become part of our general vernacular is not due to the adult world of tech or marketing,’ Bailey continues ‘and as one gets older it’s very difficult to keep up with linguistic developments, because it’s really children that drive language change. There are other drivers too, but mostly it’s kids coming up with new ways of saying things, new slang words, new terms for things, and that means that there’s always something new. But as a linguist, I love it. Even if the words are concepts that I’m not particularly a fan of, the way that the language just changes and evolves, I love. For instance, the two words that make up ‘rage bait’, they’re ancient words, but together, ‘rage bait’ as a term is brand new, based on another quite new word, ‘clickbait’, which is just a term for something that’s designed to get you to engage and click on a link. I love that we’ve got this creativity within language, and we use it to do what it is that we need to do.’
It’s still uncertain if ‘rage bait’ will continue to be spelt as two separate words or one.
‘English has this variability in the way we spell compound words, which is what this is. When you put two words together, they’re sometimes written as one word, sometimes as two separate words, sometimes hyphenated. It’s often just a historical accident. And in this case, it’s just the way that someone’s chosen to write it.’
Blog repurposed from a recent interview with Dr Laura Bailey for BBC World News.