Business Wire India
- 2025 saw huge interest in ‘parasocial’ relationships with podcasters, AI chatbots, celebrities like Taylor Swift, Lily Allen and Chappell Roan, book, film and TV characters, and social media influencers
- ‘parasocial’ is defined as ‘involving or relating to a connection that someone feels between themselves and a famous person they do not know’
Cambridge Dictionary has named parasocial as the Word of the Year for 2025.
The year was marked by interest in the one-sided parasocial relationships that people form with celebrities, influencers and AI chatbots.
When Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce announced their engagement, many fans felt a deep connection to the singer and American footballer, even though most had never met them.
Millions of fans related to Taylor Swift’s confessional lyrics about dating, heartbreak and desire, leading to what psychologists describe as "parasocial" bonds with stars.
Lily Allen’s ‘breakup album’ West End Girl leant into parasocial interest in her love life.
The spontaneity, imperfection and confessional nature of podcast hosts have been said to replace real friends and to catalyse parasocial relationships.
The emergence of parasocial relationships with AI bots saw people treat ChatGPT as a confidant, friend or even romantic partner. These led to emotionally meaningful – and in some cases troubling – connections for users, and concerns about the consequences.
The term dates back to 1956, when University of Chicago sociologists Donald Horton and Richard Wohl observed television viewers engaged in “para-social” relationships with on-screen personalities, resembling those they formed with “real” family and friends. They noted how the rapidly expanding medium of television brought the faces of actors directly into viewers’ homes, making them fixtures in people’s lives.
In 2025, the "chronically online" developed unreciprocated parasocial relationships with YouTubers and influencers who they feel they know, becoming invested in all the twists and turns of their personal lives.
The global mania around The Summer I Turned Pretty finale saw fans dissecting every romantic relationship in the show on TikTok and Instagram, as they encamped into "Team Conrad" or "Team Jeremiah".
As streamer IShowSpeed blocked an obsessive fan as his “number 1 parasocial”, the Cambridge Dictionary experienced another surge in lookups for the word.
Colin McIntosh of the Cambridge Dictionary said: “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.'"
Simone Schnall, Professor of Experimental Social Psychology, at the University of Cambridge, said: “Parasocial is an inspired choice for Word of the Year. The rise of parasocial relationships has redefined fandom, celebrity and, with AI, how ordinary people interact online.
“We’ve entered an age where many people form unhealthy and intense parasocial relationships with influencers. This leads to a sense that people ‘know’ those they form parasocial bonds with, can trust them and even to extreme forms of loyalty. Yet it’s completely one sided.
“As trust in mainstream and traditional media breaks down, people turn to individual personalities as authorities, and – when they spend many hours consuming their content – develop parasocial bonds, treating them more like close friends, family or cult leaders. When an influencer has so many followers, people assume they are trustworthy.
“There’s a more traditional and healthy manifestation of fandom as people develop parasocial ties with stars like Taylor Swift who are exceptionally good at what they do, but this can also lead to obsessive interpretations of lyrics and intense online discussions about their meanings and what they mean for fans, as well as Swift herself.
“Parasocial trends take on a new dimension as many people treat AI tools like ChatGPT as ‘friends’, offering positive affirmations, or as a proxy for therapy. This is an illusion of a relationship and group think, and we know young people can be susceptible for this.”
Other contenders for Word of the Year 2025 include:
- Slop: content on the internet that is of very low quality, especially when it is created by artificial intelligence.
- Pseudonymization: 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.
- Memeify: to turn an event, image, person, etc. into a meme (= an idea, joke, image, video, etc. that is spread very quickly on the internet).
Future entries?
Other words or meanings Cambridge began tracking in 2025 include:
- Glazing is the excessive use of praise or flattery, especially by AI chatbots, in a way that seems insincere and artificial.
When the chatbot’s responses lean too far into glazing, it immediately sounds my alarm bells.
- Bias is the object of a fan’s stanning, or excessive devotion to a singer, band or other media star. It is used especially by fans of the South Korean music genre K-pop.
My bias is V from BTS – he has the best outfits!
- Doom spending is the activity of spending money that you cannot afford in order to make yourself feel better, or when you feel anxious and uncertain about the future.
Although doom spending may provide short-term emotional relief, it can also have a long-term impact on your financial stability.
About Cambridge Dictionary
With approximately 350 million users and over 1.5 billion page views per year, Cambridge Dictionary is the world’s most popular website for learners of English and is the world’s largest free online dictionary by pageviews and sessions. It draws on the Cambridge English Corpus – a database of over 2 billion words – covering both British and American English.
The publisher of the Cambridge Dictionary, Cambridge University Press & Assessment, is the market leader in English teaching, learning, and assessment.
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