“Parasocial” chosen as Cambridge Dictionary’s word of the year

The Cambridge Dictionary has released its choice for word of the year for 2025, reflecting the behavior of followers of celebrities on social media and increasingly personal conversations with AI chatbots: “parasocial” was the term chosen to represent this year.

The dictionary defines parasocial as:

“Relating to a connection someone feels between themselves and a famous person they don’t know, a character from a book, movie, TV series, etc., or an artificial intelligence.”

The justification for the choice lies, as expected, in society’s relationship with technology. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, social networks and artificial intelligence innovations have intensified one-way relationships.

The global frenzy over the engagement of singer Taylor Swift and American football player Travis Kelce is one of this year’s clearest examples of what parasocial relationships are. The event was the subject of analysis and is commonly used to illustrate the term.

Growth in searches for parasocial in the dictionary

Another point that contributed to the choice of word of the year was the fact that searches for parasocial in the dictionary have increased significantly since June 30th. On that date, YouTuber IShowSpeed ​​blocked a fan who identified himself as his “parasocial number 1”.

Searches for the word were already on the rise before June, explains the dictionary, in part due to debates on social media about the ethics of marketers and influencers who take advantage of parasocial relationships to sell their products.

However, in June, in addition to the spike caused by the YouTuber’s case, “searches also spiked due to media coverage of Meta and OpenAI and the potential impact of their chatbots on children and mental health.”

Until then, the definition of parasocial focused on the relationship between fans and celebrities, but as a result of events in the middle of the year, in September the dictionary also included the possibility of a relationship between a person and an artificial intelligence.

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Parasocial relationships are representative of society in 2025

In its explanation of the context of choosing the word of the year, the Cambridge dictionary presents a series of events from the year 2025 that show how the word represents today’s society.

The case of the YouTuber in June, mentioned above, was followed by the launch of the subscription version of Grok, the xAI chatbot, which critics say “fostered harmful parasocial relationships.”

In August, in the United States, AI companies were ordered by Congress to develop layers of protection for minors against “harmful parasocial relationships”. In the same month, singer Taylor Swift announced her engagement.

For Colin McIntosh, editor-in-chief of the Cambridge dictionary, “it is interesting from a linguistic point of view because the term has gone from an academic term to a term used by ordinary people in their social media posts”.

“Plus, it captures the zeitgeist of 2025, as the public’s fascination with celebrities and their lifestyles continues to reach new heights.”

Although parasocial relationships are symptomatic of current times, this type of behavior has existed since at least the 19th century, highlights the Cambridge dictionary, with the first records being related to writers.

Other words considered by the Cambridge Dictionary

In its word of the year announcement, Cambridge Dictionar also released two other words that were finalists in the election.

The first of these is “pseudonymization,” which is “the process in which information relating to a specific person, such as a name or email address, is changed to a meaningless number or name so that it is impossible to identify who the information refers to.”

The other word that competed for word of the year in 2025 was “memeify”, in Portuguese it would be something like transforming into a meme. The definition is: “Transforming an event, image, person, etc., into a meme (= an idea, joke, image, video, etc., that spreads very quickly on the internet)”.

In addition to them, the Cambridge Dictionary also released a small list of words to keep an eye on:

• Glazing
• Bias
• Vibey
• Breathwork
• Doom spending

Words related to technology and social networks are gaining more and more space in the formal fields of the English language. This year, the Cambridge dictionary itself added 6000 new terms to its definitions, including many related to digital culture, such as “skibidi” and “delulu”.

Other words from the year 2025

The Cambridge Dictionary is not the only one to choose its word of the year, the same is also done by other English dictionaries.

This year, the Collins dictionary chose “vibe coding”. The finalists announced by Collins also revolve around technology, such as “broligarchy”, “clanker”, “biohacking”, among others.

The Oxford dictionary also usually chooses a word of the year, but has not yet announced the word for 2025. In 2024, the word chosen was “brain rot”.

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