As 2025 drew to a close, leading English-language dictionaries once again attempted to capture the essence of the year through our most searched terms. The selections revealed a collective focus on our digital existence and the emotional behaviours sculpted by online platforms. Rather than pointing to a single event, the vocabulary of the year mapped humanity's complex relationship with the great disruptor: artificial intelligence.
To understand what these linguistic choices reveal about our contemporary mental life, we spoke to Professor Simone Schnall, Professor of Experimental Social Psychology at the University of Cambridge. She unpacked why terms like parasocial, rage bait, and AI slop resonated so powerfully and what they signal about our psychological landscape.
Parasocial Bonds: The Illusion of Digital Intimacy
The Cambridge Dictionary's selection of parasocial brought fresh scrutiny to one-sided emotional attachments, commonly formed with influencers, fictional characters, or even AI chatbots. While the term feels distinctly modern, Professor Schnall contextualised it within a longer human history.
"People have always been, to some extent, infatuated with celebrities," she noted. "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 simply transformed the stage. Constant streams of personal content foster a potent illusion of closeness, despite the interaction remaining fundamentally unilateral. "There are basically no two-way interactions," Schnall explained. "But there is still a sense of a relationship, and parasocial captures that phenomenon very succinctly."
Rage Bait: The Algorithmic Economy of Outrage
Chosen by Oxford University Press, rage bait describes content deliberately engineered to provoke anger and outrage, solely to drive online engagement. Schnall linked its viral success to deep-seated psychological mechanisms amplified by platform design.
"It is known that inflammatory content, content that induces a lot of negative emotion, is what takes off on social media," she stated. "That kind of content gets shared and generates engagement."
Anger and moral indignation spread with viral speed online, and algorithms reward these intense reactions with greater visibility. Over time, emotional provocation has become a reliable strategy to capture precious attention, fundamentally shaping both the content produced and what circulates most widely across our feeds.
AI Slop: Navigating the Deluge of Digital Mediocrity
Australia's Macquarie Dictionary pinpointed AI slop, focusing on the torrent of low-quality, AI-generated content flooding the internet. For Schnall, the primary concern here is cognitive overload and the depletion of our attentional resources.
"Any kind of slop clogs up our attentional capacities," she emphasised. "There is only so much information a person can process."
When vast quantities of mediocre content vie for our focus, they consume the time and mental energy that could be directed toward more substantive material. "It takes up people's cognitive bandwidth," Schnall said. "And that crowds out more important information."
She also expressed skepticism toward the popular, simplified explanation of compulsive scrolling as a pursuit of "dopamine hits." "I really dislike the idea of the term 'dopamine hit' because it is overused," Schnall remarked. "People often refer to the brain to make something sound more important." While dopamine is involved in learning and reward, she stressed that the brain's complexity defies such reductive claims, noting, "There is no direct evidence where people have captured a dopamine 'hit' from scrolling."
A Cohesive Vocabulary for the Digital Age
Other dictionary selections reinforced the same themes. Merriam-Webster chose slop, defining it as low-quality digital content mass-produced, often by AI. Collins Dictionary selected vibe coding, referring to instructing AI using natural language to write software code, highlighting how machines mediate creative and technical labour.
Even the shortlisted words formed a coherent cluster. Oxford's contenders included aura farming (cultivating a charismatic public image) and biohack (tied to self-optimisation). Cambridge's list featured memeify and pseudonymisation, pointing to the reshaping of identity and meaning online.
Taken together, the winners and runners-up of 2025 create a shared lexicon for our digitally mediated lives. As Professor Schnall observed, a word like parasocial immediately makes sense because it names a familiar, lived experience. The language of the year underscores a growing public awareness of how digital systems architect our emotions, focus, and sense of connection. By giving these experiences precise names, the Words of the Year offer a crucial lens into the psychological framework that now underpins everyday life.
