2025 was filled with rage bait. Why Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year makes total sense

Oxford Dictionary just revealed its official word of 2025. It’s “rage bait.”

According to an official announcement post, Oxford Dictionary’s team of lexicographers choose a shortlist of potential words each year by analyzing data and trends to “identify new and emerging words and expressions, which our lexicographers think of as a ‘single unit’, and examine the shifts in how more established language is being used.”

This year’s final contenders were “aura farming,” “biohack,” and “rage bait.” In the end, 30,000 members of the public voted for their top choices, and Oxford chose rage bait as the winner.

Per the Oxford Dictionary’s editors, rage bait is defined as: “Online 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 web page or social media account.”

This year, rage bait has emerged as both a silly trend on platforms like TikTok and a legitimate marketing tactic for companies attempting to stand out online—and it’s a perfect encapsulation of the digital landscape in 2025.

What is rage bait?

Based on Oxford Dictionary’s analysis, the term “rage bait” was first used online more than 20 years ago, in a 2002 posting to Usenet.

In its earliest form, rage bait referred to a driver’s reaction to being flashed at by another driver requesting to pass. Since then, Oxford’s post reads, the word has “evolved into internet slang used to describe viral tweets, often to critique entire networks of content that determine what is posted online, like platforms, creators, and trends.”

In the last 12 months alone, online use of the phrase “rage bait” has tripled. On platforms like X, TikTok, and Instagram Reels, describing something as “rage bait” has become a silly trend that frequently rakes in millions of views.

For example, a creator might purposefully rage bait their parents on Thanksgiving by stating obvious facts as revelations or poking fun at their political views; rage bait their partner by asking purposefully ridiculous questions; or even rage bait their cat by interrupting their grooming process.

In the real world, rage bait has also emerged as a genuine strategy that some companies rely on to catch potential customers’ attention in an overcrowded marketing landscape.

How rage bait has become a popular marketing tactic

Shock value marketing isn’t a new concept by any stretch of the imagination. But our current era of political and technological divide has opened the door for companies to try a new kind of attention-seeking provocation.

This genre of rage bait marketing takes advantage of online algorithms, which are engineered to prioritize content that generates emotions like fear and rage to break through the deluge of content that users are looking at on a daily basis.

As Oxford Dictionary explains: “[It’s a] proven tactic to drive engagement, commonly seen in performative politics. As social media algorithms began to reward more provocative content, this has developed into practices such as rage-farming, which is a more consistently applied attempt to manipulate reactions and to build anger and engagement over time by seeding content with rage bait.”

Examples of this trend include Nucleus Genomics, a genetic health company that recently debuted an ad campaign starring phrases like, “Have your best baby” and “These babies have great genes”; Friend AI, an AI wearable company that purposefully left blank space in a recent ad campaign to encourage vandalism; and even The New York Times, which, as Fast Company writer Joe Berkowitz explains in a recent analysis, has increasingly relied on inflammatory headlines to stoke readership.

Elizabeth Paul, chief brand officer at the award-winning advertising company the Martin Agency, told Fast Company last month that rage bait marketing, unfortunately, makes a certain kind of sense for brands that are threatened by our increasingly crowded digital landscape.

“The reality is, according to Kantar, 85% of ads right now fail to meet the minimum threshold of attention for comprehension,” Paul said. “In other words, they are so bland and boring and invisible that people did not pay enough attention to even process what they said. In an environment like that, brand invisibility is a bigger threat than brand rejection.”

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