'Parasocial' is Cambridge Dictionary's 2025 Word of the Year
Do you feel like you have a personal relationship with Taylor Swift and other famous personalities, even with AI chatbots? You may be experiencing a parasocial relationship.
In an announcement on Tuesday, Nov. 18, Cambridge Dictionary named “parasocial” as the WOTD, which refers to “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."
The term was introduced by social scientists Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl of the University of Chicago, wherein they described it in their 1956 paper, Mass Communication and Para-Social Interaction: Observations on Intimacy at a Distance, how the mass media at the time "gave viewers the illusion of having a face-to-face relationship with performers."
One of the prime examples of this phenomenon was the "Beatlemania" in 1960s, where fans of the "Fab Four" were obsessed with knowing every bit of information about the group, even going as far as breaking into their hotel rooms and ambushing them at airports during their tours. Another example was fans of soap operas who relate to characters not as glamorous stars, but as real people like themselves.
This continued with social media influencers in today's time.
Colin McIntosh, Cambridge Dictionary Chief Editor, said that parasocial was named this year's WOTD due to public interest.
"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," he said in the statement.
"It also captures the zeitgeist of 2025, as the public’s fascination with celebrities and their lifestyles continues to reach new heights," he added.
Lookups for the word spiked in June 2025 when streamer IShowSpeed blocked a fan who identified as his “number 1 parasocial."
Simone Schnall, professor of experimental social psychology at the University of Cambridge, said parasocial is an "inspired" choice.
“The rise of parasocial relationships has redefined fandom, celebrity and, with AI, how ordinary people interact online,” she said. “We’ve entered an age where many people form unhealthy and intense parasocial relationships with influencers,” Schnall added.
Per the publishing company, parasocial is also being used to explain certain feelings, like parasocial intimacy, or to describe someone who is the subject of parasocial affection, like a parasocial boyfriend.
Other words that were shortlisted were pseudonymization, which refers to a process that replaces personal information, like a name or email, with different identifiers to prevent identification; and memeify, which refers to a process of turning an event, image, or person into a meme—an idea, joke, image, or video that gets viral online.
