As years come to a close, dictionaries use their status as arbiters of language to make some kind of definitive case for the single word that summed up the previous 12 months. The word chosen isn’t necessarily the most relevant word of the year.

The honor usually goes to a word that did something novel, which, given that Oxford’s 2025 Word of the Year is “rage bait,” is pretty funny considering that writing stuff for the express purpose of pissing someone off is one of humanity’s oldest traits. All the internet did was create a word to describe it.

Defined as online content engineered to provoke anger, the specific pairing of the words rage and bait has been around since around 2002. The act it describes, however, has existed practically since the first fish that would one day become hum

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