Word Of The Year 2025: Cambridge Dictionary Announces ‘Parasocial’ As Its Top Word; What Does It Mean?

The Cambridge Dictionary has declared 'parasocial' as the Word of the Year for 2025. The term 'parasocial' refers to a one-sided bond people develop with someone they have never met, including public figures or even artificial intelligence.

The official definition of the term 'parasocial' in the Cambridge Dictionary reads, "involving or relating to a connection that someone feels between themselves and a famous person they do not know, a character in a book, film, TV series, etc, or an artificial intelligence."

Why Parasocial?

The Cambridge Dictionary said that the word gained prominence as social media has intensified the intimacy that fans feel with their adored celebrities. “With the rise in popularity of AI companions that can take on personalities, the word for these one-way relationships – parasocial – is having its own moment,” it added. It said the prominence was, in part, driven by the debate on social platforms about the ethics of marketers and influencers who take advantage of parasocial relationships.

Talking about parasocial being picked as the World of the year, Colin McIntosh, Cambridge Dictionary Chief Editor, said, "Parasocial stood out in 2025 for several reasons. Public interest in the term increased massively this year, as we can see from our data: the number of searches for it in the Cambridge Dictionary as well as on Google spiked on several occasions. It’s interesting from a language point of view because it has made the transition from an academic term to one used by ordinary people in their social media posts. And it also captures the zeitgeist of 2025, as the public’s fascination with celebrities and their lifestyles continues to reach new heights."

iShowSpeed's Viral Parasocial Fan

The Cambridge Dictionary said that the lookups of parasocial spiked on June 30, 2025 when famous YouTube streamer iShowSpeed blocked a fan who identified as his "number 1 parasocial". The female fan had posted a thread about iShowSpeed's breakup with singer Vanessa.

Lookups also surged due to media coverage about Meta and OpenAI and the potential effect of their AI chatbots on children and mental health. Cambridge Dictionary updated the definition of parasocial in September 2025 to include the possibility of a relationship with artificial intelligence (AI).

Origin Of The Word

Social scientists Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl of the University of Chicago introduced the term “para-social” in their 1956 paper titled “Mass Communication and Para-Social Interaction: Observations on Intimacy at a Distance,” published in the journal Psychology: Interpersonal and Biological Processes. They explained how the media of that era created the illusion that audiences were engaging in direct, face-to-face relationships with performers.

Only two other words were on Cambridge Dictionary's 2025 shortlist for the World of the Year. They are: ‘pseudonymization’ and ‘memeify’. The term 'pseudonymization' is defined as "a process in which information that relates to a particular person, for example, a name or email address, is changed to a number or name that has no meaning so that it is impossible to see who the information relates to", while Cambridge Dictionary defines ‘memeify’ as "to turn an event, image, person, etc. into a meme (= an idea, joke, image, video, etc. that is spread very quickly on the internet)"

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