Come December, dictionaries attempt to capture the texture of a year through our most searched words, and finally declare their Words of the Year. In 2025, across English-language dictionaries, the focus settled on our digital lives and the emotional behaviour shaped by online platforms. Rather than marking a single event, the year’s vocabulary mapped how people are relating to that great disrupter, artificial intelligence.
To explore what this pattern reveals, I spoke to Professor Simone Schnall, Professor of Experimental Social Psychology at the University of Cambridge, about why terms such as parasocial, rage bait and AI slop resonated so strongly in 2025, and what they suggest about contemporary mental life.
Parasocial relationships and modern intimacy
Cambridge Dictionary’s selection of parasocial brought renewed attention to one-sided emotional bonds, often formed with public figures, fictional characters or artificial intelligence. While the term feels current, Schnall placed the experience in a much longer historical context.
“People have always been, to some extent, infatuated with celebrities,” she said. “It could have been actors on television, or even before that, powerful personalities like a king or an emperor. People felt a sense of connection or admiration even though there were no direct interactions.”
Digital platforms have only altered the setting. Constant access to personal content creates a stronger sense of proximity, even when interaction remains one-sided. “There are basically no two-way interactions,” Schnall said. “But there is still a sense of a relationship, and parasocial captures that phenomenon very succinctly.”
Rage bait and the economics of outrage
Oxford University Press’s Word of the Year, rage bait, describes content created to provoke anger or outrage in order to increase engagement. Schnall linked its success to well-established psychological patterns. “It is known that inflammatory content, content that induces a lot of negative emotion, is what takes off on social media,” she said. “That kind of content gets shared and generates engagement.”
Anger and moral outrage spread quickly online, and platforms reward such responses through visibility. Over time, emotional provocation becomes an effective way to command attention, shaping both what is produced and what circulates most widely.
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AI slop and the limits of attention
The Macquarie Dictionary’s choice of AI slop focused on the flood of low-quality content generated by artificial intelligence. For Schnall, the main concern is the cognitive overload. “Any kind of slop clogs up our attentional capacities,” she said. “There is only so much information a person can process.”
When large volumes of mediocre content compete for attention, they consume time and focus that might otherwise be spent on more meaningful material. “It takes up people’s cognitive bandwidth,” Schnall said. “And that crowds out more important information.”
Public explanations for compulsive scrolling often invoke the idea of dopamine-driven reward cycles. Schnall was skeptical about how accurately that language reflects what is known about the brain.
“I really dislike the idea of the term ‘dopamine hit’ because it is overused,” she said. “People often refer to the brain to make something sound more important.”
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Dopamine is involved in learning and reward, and it likely plays a role in habit formation. But simplified claims about chemical rewards fail to capture the complexity of cognition.
“There is no direct evidence where people have captured a dopamine ‘hit’ from scrolling,” Schnall said. “The brain is very complex.”
A shared vocabulary for digital life
Other dictionaries arrived at different words, but not different conclusions. Merriam-Webster selected slop, defining it as low-quality digital content produced at scale, often through artificial intelligence, while Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary narrowed the idea further with AI slop, describing error-prone, unsolicited generative output.
Collins chose vibe coding, a term for prompting AI in natural language to write computer code, reflecting how creative and technical labour are increasingly mediated by machines.
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Even among words that did not ultimately win, the themes remained consistent. Oxford shortlisted aura farming, referring to the deliberate cultivation of a charismatic public image, and biohack, tied to self-optimisation culture, while Cambridge’s contenders included memeify and pseudonymisation, both pointing to how identity and meaning are reshaped online. Dictionary.com, meanwhile, selected 67, a viral slang expression with no fixed meaning.
Taken together, the winners and near-misses formed a tightly clustered vocabulary. As Schnall put it, a word like parasocial quickly makes sense to people once they encounter it, because it describes something already familiar.
The language of 2025 suggests a growing awareness of how digital systems shape emotion, focus and connection. By naming these experiences, the words of the year offer insight into the psychological landscape that now frames everyday life.
The language of 2025 suggests a growing awareness of how digital systems shape emotion, focus and connection. (Generated using AI)
