The word itself is not new. It’s been around since 1956, though it was coined for people’s relationship with a different kind of screen.

Who saw this coming? Cambridge Dictionary has named Parasocial as the Word of the Year for 2025. It 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.”

The word itself is not new. It’s been around since 1956, though it was coined for people’s relationship with a different kind of screen. American sociologists used it to describe TV viewers’ increased interest with/in on-screen personalities. But Parasocial stayed comfortably in the realm of academia all this time. “It’s only fairly recently that

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