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Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.
Dictionaries have two reliable ways of making news. The first is announcing which words have been added. The second is announcing their “Word of the Year.”
Here’s a look at what have been chosen as the words of the year so far.
The Cambridge Dictionary
Parasocial: “Parasocial captures the 2025 zeitgeist. It’s a great example of how language changes. What was once a specialist academic term has become mainstream. Millions of people are engaged in parasocial relationships; many more are simply intrigued by their rise. The data reflects that, with the Cambridge Dictionary website seeing spikes in lookups for ‘parasocial’.
My take: I first heard this word in the context of podcast listening, but Cambridge argues that it is now breaking into celebrity and influencer culture. How different are these “parasocial” relationships than being super into Nirvana in 1991 or being a close watcher of the Royal Family? Mostly is that the objects of these relationships are feeding the social algorithms with a steady stream of erstaz intimacy.
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Oxford University Press
Rage bait: “After three days of voting in which more than 30,000 people had their say, we have chosen rage bait as our official Oxford Word of the Year for 2025. With 2025’s news cycle dominated by social unrest, debates about the regulation of online content, and concerns over digital wellbeing, our experts noticed that the use of rage bait this year has evolved to signal a deeper shift in how we talk about attention—both how it is given and how it is sought after—engagement, and ethics online. The word has also increased threefold in usage in the last 12 months, according to our language data.
My take: This is nothing new of course, neither online nor in pre-digital life. What does seem to me new is everyone knows what it is, how do it, why it stinks, and yet cannot help themselves. No one is convinced. No one finds it funny. It does one thing: make us hate ourselves and others.
Dictionary.com
67: “To select the 2025 Word of the Year, our lexicographers analyzed a large amount of data including newsworthy headlines, trends on social media, search engine results, and more to identify words that made an impact on our conversations, online and in the real world.
Searches for 67 experienced a dramatic rise beginning in the summer of 2025. Since June, those searches have increased more than sixfold, and so far the surge shows no signs of stopping. Most other two-digit numbers had no meaningful trend over that period, implying that there is something special about 67.”
My take: Here it is, the reducto ad absurdum of internet dialect. A phrase that means nothing repeated only for the sake of repeating something everyone knows means nothing. This is the leading candidate for “hey do you remember when we all said that in middle school? We were so dumb, lol.”
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Merriam-Webster has not yet made their announcement, but I would bet that, like the other selections, it will be a word that oozed out of internet slime. And I think the new word/phrase that emerged this year that both captures and critiques our current enthrallment to online ways of being is this: AI slop. The word, like the thing it describes, has a beautiful terror to it.
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