The ‘word of the year’ selected by a dictionary expresses what it feels is the zeitgeist of the age. It is also one that has stood the test of time and is in common use. ‘Parasocial’ is the Cambridge Dictionary’s word of the year for 2025. It means a relationship felt by someone with a celebrity or a podcast host or an Artificial Intelligence bot. It is a feeling of unreciprocated intimacy with someone or something, often with the belief that the object of affection feels the same way. Thus it is more than
an obsession; it is a feeling that the person or the non-person is as real as family or friends. The phenomenon was first noticed in the 1950s by social scientists. When television brought celebrities into the drawing room, whether in movies or serial programmes or sports events, some people began to develop close connections with them. The social scientists called this kind of relationship ‘parasocial’ and the word remained in academic usage for a long time. But now it has come into common use to such an extent that it can become a word of the year.
What does it say about the zeitgeist? At the very least, it implies the dominance of social media and screen culture. But it has an alarming dimension. The high usage of the word shows an increased attention to unreal or virtual connections, an undermining of human relationships and a scaling down of their importance. The sense of ownership over those at the other end of parasocial relationships may become dangerous. It can affect the emotions deeply and cause depression when the celebrities act in a way disliked by the person in a parasocial relationship with them. Neither is a relationship of some people with AI bots healthy. These can be regarded as confidants, best friends or objects of love. The transference of true emotion into parasocial relationships naturally diminishes the ability to feel deeply in person-to-person connections.
It is interesting that the Cambridge Dictionary’s shortlist for word of the year mostly contains words that are directly or indirectly associated with the internet and social media. That is a measure of the degree to which these have taken over lives. ‘Pseudonymisation’ is the process of changing personal information into meaningless identifiers for the sake of privacy; ‘memeify’ is to turn anything into a meme; even the familiar ‘slop’ means something else — material of low quality on the internet, especially that created by AI. Neither has the traditional wife been left alone: she is ‘tradwife’, a married woman who posts about domesticity from her home. The
witty dimension of such word-making or meaning-change is undeniable, but the sense of the internet and social media gradually spreading their tentacles into the consciousness is unavoidable too. In that sense, ‘parasocial’ relationships are perhaps the most ominous. They reach deep down into human emotions and cannot be dislodged easily.