AI chatbots, Taylor Swift, and social media influencers all played a part in deciding Cambridge Dictionary’s Word of the Year, 2025: “parasocial.”
Parasocial — revealed by the global dictionary on Tuesday as its word of the year — refers to the connection a person feels to an online personality ranging from celebrities to podcasters, and even artificial intelligence.
“Parasocial relationship is when we think we know someone, or we feel very close to someone who’s in fact, a person we’ve never met, like a celebrity, an influencer, or somebody in public life who’s famous for some reason,” Simone Schnall, professor of experimental social psychology at the University of Cambridge, told CNBC Make It.
“In reality, of course, it’s only a one-sided, so-called relationship,” she added.
The term originated in 1956 when University of Chicago sociologists Donald Horton and Richard Wohl found that people who watched television were treating the actors on-screen like friends or family.
