What is 'rage bait'? Oxford Word of the Year 2025

Oxford Word of the Year 2025

Oxford University Press (OUP) has named 'rage bait' as the Oxford Word of the Year 2025, following a public vote that saw more than 30,000 people worldwide have their say over three days. OUP's language experts shortlisted three contenders—rage bait, aura farming, and biohack—to reflect some of the moods and conversations that have shaped the past year. The winning word was chosen by a combination of votes, sentiment of public commentary, and analysis of OUP’s lexical data.

With the 2025 news cycle dominated by societal unrest, debates about the regulation of online content, and concerns over digital wellbeing, the use of rage bait has evolved this year to signal a deeper shift in how we talk about attention—both how it is given and how it is sought after—engagement, and ethics online. Defined as ‘online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, typically posted in order to increase traffic to or engagement with a particular web page or social media account’, usage of rage bait increased threefold in the last 12 months.

Rage bait is a compound of the words ‘rage’ (violent outburst of anger) and ‘bait’ (an attractive morsel of food)—both well-established terms in English dating back to Middle English times. Although a close parallel to the etymologically related clickbait—with a shared objective of encouraging online engagement and the potential to elicit annoyance—rage bait has a more specific focus on evoking anger, discord, and polarization. The emergence of rage bait as a standalone term highlights both the flexibility of English language, where two established words can be combined to give a more specific meaning in a particular context—in this case, online—and come together to create a term that speaks to the world today.

First used online in a posting on Usenet in 2002 as a way to designate a particular type of driver reaction to being flashed by another driver requesting to pass them, it introduced the idea of deliberate agitation. Rage bait then evolved into internet slang used to describe viral tweets—often to critique entire networks of content that determine what is posted online, like platforms, creators, and trends.

Since then, it has become shorthand for content designed to elicit anger by being frustrating, offensive, or deliberately divisive in nature, and a mainstream term referenced in newsrooms across the world and discourse amongst content creators. It’s also a proven tactic to drive engagement commonly seen in performative politics, and has developed into practices like rage-farming—a more consistently applied attempt to manipulate reactions and to build anger and engagement over time by seeding content with rage bait, particularly in the form of deliberate misinformation of conspiracy theory- based material—as social media algorithms began to reward provocative content.

Speaking about Oxford Word of the Year 2025, Casper Grathwohl, President, Oxford Languages, says, ‘As technology and artificial intelligence become ever more embedded into

our daily lives—from deepfake celebrities and AI-generated influencers to virtual companions and dating platforms—there’s no denying that 2025 has been a year defined by questions around who we truly are; both online and offline.

‘The fact that the word rage bait exists and has seen such a dramatic surge in usage means we’re increasingly aware of the manipulation tactics we can be drawn into online. Before, the internet was focused on grabbing our attention by sparking curiosity in exchange for clicks, but now we’ve seen a dramatic shift to it hijacking and influencing our emotions, and how we respond. 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.

‘Where last year’s choice, brain rot, captured the mental drain of endless scrolling, rage bait shines a light on the content purposefully engineered to spark outrage and drive clicks. And together, they form 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 our thinking and behaviour.

'Year after year, it’s incredible to see the campaign spark curiosity, conversation, and—most importantly—participation. The Oxford Word of the Year invites us to pause and reflect on the forces shaping our collective language. I can’t wait to see what the next year brings.'