Over the past few months, Jennifer Lawrence, World Series fans and Right-wing influencers have all confessed to it. And now, the people behind the Oxford English Dictionary are getting into the act.
Oxford University Press has chosen “rage bait” — defined as “online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative or offensive” — as its 2025 Word of the Year.
“Rage bait”, which triumphed over the more upbeat “biohack” and “aura farming”, goes back at least to 2002, when it appeared in a post on a Usenet discussion group to describe a particular kind of driver reaction to being flashed by another driver seeking to pass. Since then, it has become an increasingly common slang term for an attention-seeking form of online behaviour.
“Even if people have never heard it before, they instantly know what it means,” Casper Grathwohl, the president of Oxford Languages, said in an interview. “And they want to talk about it.
"People feel so passionately, there’s no way to avoid rage-baiting a portion of the word-loving public," he said. “No matter what we choose, a bunch of people are going to flame out online.”
“Rage bait” appeared in the headlines in early November after Jennifer Lawrence confessed to creating an anonymous TikTok handle so she could fight with movie fans online.
New York Times News Service