Oxford University has announced that the word of the year 2025 is The taste of anger, A term associated with Internet culture and the way in which it is done Anger became a tool to attract attention. His choice seeks to reflect the emotional climate that has dominated the digital conversation recently.
Oxford specifies The taste of anger Like type Content intentionally designed to stir up anger, frustration, or controversy in order to increase clicks, comments, and exposure on social media. Unlike Clickbait – which arouses curiosity -, The taste of anger It relies on negative emotions to activate rapid reactions and spread them. In linguistic data analyzed by Oxford Languages, Its use has tripled this yearEspecially in political discussions, viral news and controversial trends.
As Kasper Grathwohl, head of Oxford’s Department of Languages, has explained, selection responds to a shift in the “economy of attention”: “The fact that the word exists The taste of anger Its increased use means that we are increasingly aware of the manipulation we can fall into online. “Previously, the Internet focused on capturing our attention by sparking our curiosity in exchange for clicks, but now we have seen a radical change: it now hijacks and influences our emotions and how we respond to them.”
The term, chosen by more than 30,000 people, beat out finalists such as Areola transplantation (which means cultivating a public image by presenting yourself “in a way that subtly attempts to convey an air of confidence, calm, or mysticism”) and com. biohack (“an attempt to improve or enhance physical or mental performance, health, or longevity”), and is also associated with cultural and technological shifts.
The Oxford decision joins a series of recent elections seeking to capture how the public conversation has changed. A few days ago, Dictionary.com surprised me with another expression –Six seven– Chosen as the word of the year in another linguistic record, its ambiguous explanation has sparked global interest. This choice reflects the difficulty of creating a single meaning in the age of the Internet and social networks, where expressions appear, are reshaped, and spread very quickly. Consecration The taste of anger He continues this line: In this case not because of the ambiguity, but because of the power that the term uses in naming a phenomenon that anyone using social networks can recognize.
Although many users may not have seen the written expression, the phenomenon it describes is familiar: posts that seek to incite anger to spark arguments, videos designed to provoke or posts that generate battles in the comments. With this choice, Oxford not only legitimizes a word that was already in circulation, but also proposes a diagnosis for the digital culture of 2025, where attention seems increasingly based on intense stimuli and negative emotions.