From rage bait to AI slop to parasocial, the Words of the Year explain what happened in 2025

It’s awards season, and it’s not just books, music and movies that are being recognized for their cultural impact. Every year since 1990, major language organizations like the American Dialect Society and Merriam-Webster announce their picks for the word of the year.

As you may have seen, the cryptic phrase “6, 7” took the prize from the voters at Dictionary.com this year, and other winners have been rolling out steadily over the last few weeks.

Stefan Fatsis is a writer who covers the history of language and how we use it. He recently wrote a piece for LitHub about the Word of the Year phenomenon — it was adapted from his book “Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) The Modern Dictionary.”

Fatsis joined The Show to discuss the very first Word of the Year, and how the annual tradition has evolved.

Full conversation

STEFAN FATSIS: Yeah, that first word of the year was bushlips, meaning insincere political rhetoric. It was a reference to George Bush running for president, saying, "read my lips, no new taxes," elder George Bush.

SAM DINGMAN: That word's fairly quick fade in relevance, it prompted this bigger conversation about how a word of the year should be chosen and what that choice should reflect. Tell us a little bit about how the debate evolved.

FATSIS: What emerged quickly was this notion that a word to represent an entire year had to have had some traction. The evolution of word of the year in the last 35 years has definitely tilted more toward slang and things that have bubbled up on Twitter, culture, social media. And these are just part, it's just normal linguistic evolution.

The way we think about words changes over time, and social media have certainly had this dramatic effect on the way words are created, spawned, disseminated and then consumed.

DINGMAN: Well, something about this social media context really reminds me of one of my favorite lines from the piece you wrote about this. And the line is, quote, "as a culture, we're forever searching for ways to make sense of our big, complicated, confusing world. Word of the Year neatly boxes up 365 days in a single simple word. It's media, catnip and hot take gold."

And one of the things that made me think about is that the word of the year, it seems like, has evolved into something that, like, we're, because of social media, we're often looking for something to collectively argue about.

FATSIS: Absolutely. I mean, we're always looking for things to argue about. Right. I mean, the other parallel I make is it's no different than arguing about who's better, LeBron or Jordan.

DINGMAN: Yeah.

FATSIS: These sorts of conversations fuel social media. Yeah. So what started as this academic exercise and has continued to be that with dialect society has sort of morphed into this marketing opportunity for dictionaries.

Now, at a time when dictionaries are struggling, that's all good for business, but I think it's also good for society. Word of the Year is just one more opportunity to dissect who we are as people and where our culture is at any given moment.

DINGMAN: So, I mean, as evidenced by bushlips, there has always been a sort of a political valence to the Word of the Year. But there was a shift in the tone of the debate in 2016.

FATSIS: The vote for the 2016 Word of the Year was held in January of 2017 in Austin, Texas, at a linguistics conference, which is where it's held every year. [President Donald] Trump had just been elected to his first term and the discourse was all Trump, all the time.

And looking back on this, it's a reminder of just how much language was transformed and dominated by that election basket of deplorables. Post truth, alt right, fake news. There were so many terms that overwhelmed the media conversation, and the winner was dumpster fire. And it beat woke.

And that vote, to me is really interesting because woke was sort of at its peak for its old now meaning, meaning progressive, aware, which is how that word evolved from African American vernacular English.

You can date it back into the 1930s with a rise in the 1960s and again in the '90s. And since then, woke has been twisted into a pejorative and dumpster fire is still just a dumpster fire. So words have these first acts, second acts, third acts.

DINGMAN: Well, in the vein of all of this, Stefan, I wonder if we could just step quickly through the Word of the Year selections that have been announced so far. I'd love to get your take on how they fit into what we've been talking about. First, let's go with the Oxford Dictionary has decided to go with rage bait.

FATSIS: Rage bait is content online that's deliberately provocative. And that word fits in with where we are culturally right now, this period of uncertainty and hate and violence.

So that sort of threads the needle that a good Word of the Year should thread. Something that has gained a lot of popularity, and that is, you can prove that by looking at databases, which is what Oxford and other dictionaries do, but it's directly related to where we are as a culture.

DINGMAN: Let's move now to the choice by the Macquarie Dictionary. They have decided to go with AI slop.

FATSIS: Yes, that's an Australian dictionary. And if you're going to pick a word of the year, you can't go wrong picking one that is connected to AI because it has dominated the discourse, the sort of non-political discourse, but again with overlap into politics, because AI is a concern for how conversations are happening online and the reliability of words and the abuse of this new technology. And that's where the slop art comes in.

DINGMAN: So next up we have Cambridge Dictionary and they have gone with a word that, and I'm curious to know if you disagree with this, but to me felt a couple years out of date, which is parasocial.

FATSIS: Yeah, parasocial does feel a little bit older. But again, Cambridge says massive increase in lookups for this term. They pegged it to Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce, you know, viral characters in our online discourse.

What I found interesting about their explanation for parasocial was that it emerged from academia a long time ago, parasocial dates to 1956, according to Cambridge. And that's not uncommon with words that have emerged in as important an academic coinage that didn't emerge popularly in cultural culture for decades.

DINGMAN: I have to say one of the other things that's interesting about stepping through all of these choices is there is something kind of neatly boxing up, to borrow your phrasing of this year, that in a year where AI slop seems like one of the most relevant things to the folks at Macquarie. Parasocial is relevant to the folks at Cambridge. AI slop being, you know, fake stuff that is trying to be passed off as real, and parasocial, referring to relationships with real people that people feel like they have. But of course, unless they are personal friends with Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift, don't.

FATSIS: It's almost like Words of the Year should be like a team because collectively they do a great job of explaining what happened in the last year, even if individually they might not. You get this nice range that sort of bottles up what we were about for the last 365 days.