Rage Bait, Slop, AI Slop, Parasocial, Vibe Coding, and Gen Alpha slang “67” named Words of the Year by top dictionaries and publications. They also sum up our year on the internet.
1 / 6Rage Bait (Oxford Dictionary) | Online content engineered to provoke anger or outrage to drive clicks, comments, and algorithmic engagement. Its earliest known use was in 2002 on Usenet. Oxford chose it from a shortlist that included other rising internet-culture words like ‘aura farming’ and ‘biohack’.
2 / 6Slop (The Economist) | This word refers to the torrent of low-quality, auto-generated, error-ridden content churned out by AI. In 2025, it became shorthand for shallow articles, spammy videos, and algorithmic filler cluttering the internet. The Economist chose ‘slop’ because it captures the collective frustration with the declining quality of online information.
3 / 6AI Slop (Macquarie Dictionary) | AI slop was also Macquarie Dictionary’s chosen word of the year which was defined as “low-quality content created by generative AI, often containing errors, and not requested by the user”. This describes poor automatically generated images, unsolicited AI-written posts, or summaries. The choice of words by both The Economist and Macquarie highlights how widespread shallow AI content became in 2025.
4 / 6Parasocial (Cambridge Dictionary) | A relationship that feels intimate but is entirely one-sided, such as a relationship formed with a celebrity, a fictional character, or even an AI system. Sociologists coined the term ‘parasocial interaction’ to describe the illusion of intimacy viewers feel with media personalities.
5 / 6Vibe Coding (Collins Dictionary) | A slang term for coding with the help of AI, where the developer uses natural-language prompts to generate software, focusing on “direction and ‘vibes'” rather than traditional line-by-line programming. The term was coined by Andrej Karpathy of OpenAI.
6 / 667 (Chosen by Dictionary.com) | Pronounced “six-seven,” this is a deliberately ambiguous Gen Alpha slang term that can mean ‘so-so,’ ‘maybe,’ or ‘it depends’. Dictionary.com broke tradition by choosing a number instead of a word for the first time in its history.
