Good news for those who find their blood pressure rising as they scroll through their online news feeds: the Oxford English Dictionary\u2019s publisher has highlighted the term they might need to describe how they often feel, naming \u201crage bait\u201d as its word of the year.<\/p>\n
According to the Oxford University Press\u2019 analysis, use of the phrase has tripled in the past 12 months.<\/p>\n
It defines it as \u201conline 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 webpage or social media content\u201d.<\/p>\n
Casper Grathwohl, the president of Oxford Languages, said its very existence showed how aware people were becoming of the \u201cmanipulation tactics\u201d used to grab their attention online.<\/p>\n
\u201cBefore, the internet was focused on grabbing our attention by sparking curiosity in exchange for clicks, but now we\u2019ve seen a dramatic shift to it hijacking and influencing our emotions, and how we respond.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt feels like the natural progression in an ongoing conversation about what it means to be human in a tech-driven world \u2013and the extremes of online culture.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said that, where last year\u2019s choice \u2013 \u201cbrain rot\u201d \u2013 \u201ccaptured the mental drain of endless scrolling, \u2018rage bait\u2019 shines a light on the content purposefully engineered to spark outrage and drive clicks\u201d.<\/p>\n
The two together, Grathwohl said, \u201cform a powerful cycle where outrage sparks engagement, algorithms amplify it, and constant exposure leaves us mentally exhausted. These words don\u2019t just define trends; they reveal how digital platforms are reshaping our thinking and behaviour.\u201d<\/p>\n
While the term is being recognised in 2025, the Oxford University Press said \u201crage bait\u201d had been around since just after the turn of the century. It was \u201cfirst used online in a posting on Usenet in 2002 as a way to designate a particular type of driver reaction to being flashed at by another driver requesting to pass them, introducing the idea of deliberate agitation\u201d.<\/p>\n
It said the term evolved into internet slang used to \u201cdescribe viral tweets, often to critique entire networks of content that determine what is posted online, like platforms, creators and trends\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Good news for those who find their blood pressure rising as they scroll through their online news feeds:…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":292980,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-292979","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292979","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=292979"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292979\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/292980"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=292979"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=292979"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=292979"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}