About

Rage Bait or Ragebait, also known as Rage Baiting or Outrage Bait, is a slang term for content that is explicitly made for the purpose of causing anger in others online. Though it originally started as an offshoot of flaming and trolling, with the increased monetization of the internet and take culture, the practice of rage baiting has turned into a strategy for generating impressions through angering people into engagement. While similar to engagement bait, rage bait is specifically created to elicit visceral reactions from people to consequently boost content or interest in something through outrage.

In late November 2025, Oxford University named rage bait as its "Word of the Year" for 2025, prompting widespread media coverage and reactions online.

Origin

The act of purposely trying to make people mad existed before the internet and persisted into its infancy. In the 1990s, flamebait was a prevailing term, but it quickly fell out of style. Before Trollface existed in 2008 and before griefing helped create rage quitting, rage bait was the primary way that people would try to get others to be mad online.

One of the earliest examples is a post on YTMND by the user Vyldan^[1] that he titled "Downvote Bait." The sole purpose of the post, which was created on March 18th, 2006, was to use "Jack's Lament" from The Nightmare Before Christmas as the background music to mock a review he got saying that his post using Arial font was given a downvote simply for using Arial (shown below).

Rage bait continued to exist under the guise of other terms until December 20th, 2009, when Urban Dictionary user E. Nygma^[2] wrote the definition for it, stating that it is "saying something that will obviously piss someone off just to get the reaction," which closely aligns rage bait with other common forms of engagement bait and general acts of trolling (shown below).

Spread

In the mid-2010s, rage bait was often used as a part of clickbait online in which the underlying idea was to do whatever it took to get as many views as possible, typically by evoking strong reactions toward content.

One component of clickbait, the YouTube Storytime Clickbait, would often have a video that involved raging or trying to get others angry so they would watch the video. On April 17th, 2017, Twitter user @GeneralAlpacaYT^[3] made a meme using that format and a Casey Neistat video about a woman screaming on a plane (shown below).

Rage bait became a prominent part of content creation and monetization in the late 2010s, with many content creators and outlets using it as a way to ensure clicks and impressions on content for the express purpose of ad revenue. Because of this, controversial or dissenting opinions posted online are sometimes pre-warned as not being rage bait, as seen in the video uploaded by Twitter user @JoeBuddenPod^[4] in which rage baiting is discussed as something that should be avoided (shown below).

Oxford Word of the Year 2025

On November 30th, 2025, Oxford University announced its annual "Word of the Year" for 2025, selecting the slang term "rage bait" as its winner.^[5] In the announcement post, Oxford stated, "After three days of voting in which more than 30,000 people had their say, we have chosen rage bait as our official Oxford Word of the Year for 2025."

Additional words in the shortlist for 2025's WOTY notably included "aura farming" and "biohack."

That same day, the official University of Oxford Twitter / X^[6] account (@UniofOxford) posted about rage bait winning its WOTY competition, receiving over 175,000 views, 5,100 likes, 1,500 retweets and 90 replies in roughly 20 hours.

Numerous media outlets, including the New York Times^[7] and others, covered Oxford's WOTY for 2025. Additionally, the announcement sparked widespread reactions and discourse online in late 2025.

For example, the announcement was shared to the /r/news^[8] subreddit on November 30th, 2025, receiving over 1,500 upvotes and 200 comments in 18 hours.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References