From 'Rage Bait' to '6-7', know different terms that bagged word of the year 2025 title

Do you know the meaning of terms that have been selected as word of the year 2025?

Every year, different dictionaries pick their word of the year. This year too, new terms have bagged the title. The selection is typically made after studying what terms are gaining prominence, factoring in public inputs, what terms reflect the mood of the year, or are culturally significant.

Oxford University Press' word of the year is 'Rage bait'

It's possible that you may not have heard the term, but chances are high that you have participated in the trend. On social media, there's a lot of content out there that is put out to provoke your anger, or frustration. It is designed in a manner to encourage viewers to click on it.

Oxford defines the term 'rage bait' 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 content”.

The other two words that were shortlisted are 'Aura farming' and 'Biohack'.

Cambridge dictionary's word of the year is 'parasocial'

Cambridge announced 'parasocial' as the word of the year 2025. What it means? Well, parasocial is when individuals feel a connection with someone who they don't know personally. One of the instances to best describe the term is when Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce announed their engagement, many fans felt a deep connection to the couple despite not having known them personally.

The others words that were shortlisted are 'pseudonymization' and 'memeify'.

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Collins dictionary's word of the year is 'Vibe coding'

Well, the term 'vibe coding' was actually popularized by OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy. He described it as the new way of programming. So, what developers are doing these days is they're describing to AI tools what kind of computer programs they have to create. Instead of writing the codes manually, they are giving a detailed description to AI chatbots.

Managing Director of Collins Alex Beecroft said that “vibe coding” captures the evolving relationship between language and technology. The term highlights how conversational AI is reshaping the way humans interact with machines and create software.

Other words that were shortlisted by Collins dictionary were 'biohacking', 'clanker' and 'aura farming'.

Dictionary.com's word of the year is '6-7'

The search volume for '67' was going up. Even though nobody really is sure what these two numbers connote. Dictionary.com shared that their choice reflects how digital culture reshapes language, when nobody really knows what it means.

The origin of the word is thought to be a song called 'Doot Doot(67) by rapper Skrilla. The song was featured in a lot of clips that featured NBA player LaMelo Bal. The latter's height is 6 foot 7 inches. So, some people link the term to his height.

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Other words that were shortlisted by the dictionary are 'agentic, 'aura farming', 'broligarchy', 'clanker', among others.