You know that feeling when you think you could be real-life friends with a singer, actor, or TV character? There’s a word for that, and it’s Cambridge Dictionary’s word of the year for 2025.

Cambridge Dictionary named “parasocial” as its word of the year for 2025, highlighting the growing sense of connection people feel to individuals with whom they have no real association. In the age of social media and AI chatbots, maintaining a one-sided online relationship has never been easier, and thus, parasocial connections are all around us.

Cambridge defines the term as “involving or relating to a connection that someone feels between themselves and a famous person they do not know, a character in a book, film, TV series, etc., or an artificial intelligence.”

But what do these parasocial rela

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