Oxford University Press (OUP) has picked “rage bait” as the Oxford Word of the Year 2025 after a global public vote involving more than 30,000 participants.

The term, which refers to online content deliberately crafted to provoke anger to drive engagement, saw its usage triple over the past year. It beat out two other shortlisted words, aura farming and biohack.

The rise of rage bait reflects growing concerns about online manipulation, digital well-being, polarisation, and attention-driven algorithms. Although related to ‘clickbait’, rage bait more specifically targets anger and division.

The term originated in 2002 in an online forum and has since evolved into mainstream usage, especially in journalism, social media culture, and political communication. It is also tied to practices like rage-farming, where creators or platforms repeatedly seed provocative content to build sustained outrage.

OUP’s Casper Grathwohl noted that the word captures a broader shift in how technology and AI shape identity, emotions, and online behaviour. Following last year’s Word of the Year, “brain rot”, the choice highlights a cycle in which outrage drives engagement, algorithms amplify it, and users experience mental exhaustion.