Good news for those who find their blood pressure rising as they scroll through their online news feeds: the Oxford English Dictionary’s publisher has highlighted the term they might need to describe how they often feel, naming “rage bait” as its word of the year.
According to the Oxford University Press’ analysis, use of the phrase has tripled in the past 12 months.
It defines it 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 webpage or social media content”.
Casper Grathwohl, the president of Oxford Languages, said its very existence showed how aware people were becoming of the “manipulation tactics” used to grab their attention online.
“Before, the internet was focused on grabbing our attention by sparking curiosity in exchange for clicks, but now we’ve seen a dramatic shift to it hijacking and influencing our emotions, and how we respond.
“It feels like the natural progression in an ongoing conversation about what it means to be human in a tech-driven world –and the extremes of online culture.”
He said that, where last year’s choice – “brain rot” – “captured the mental drain of endless scrolling, ‘rage bait’ shines a light on the content purposefully engineered to spark outrage and drive clicks”.
The two together, Grathwohl said, “form a powerful cycle where outrage sparks engagement, algorithms amplify it, and constant exposure leaves us mentally exhausted. These words don’t just define trends; they reveal how digital platforms are reshaping our thinking and behaviour.”
While the term is being recognised in 2025, the Oxford University Press said “rage bait” had been around since just after the turn of the century. It was “first 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”.
It said the term 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”.
