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If you were more excited about Taylor Swift's engagement announcement earlier this year than your friend or family member's engagement announcement, you may be familiar with the word “2025” from the Cambridge Dictionary.
“Parasocial” earns the title, Cambridge announced today, thanks to some high-profile use cases, as well as the rise of digital communications and artificial intelligence technologies that make it easier to form these kinds of connections.
The adjective describes a one-way connection a person has with someone they don't know—for example, a celebrity or influencer, a fictional character in a book, or an artificially intelligent chatbot.
“Millions of people are involved in parasocial relationships; many others are simply intrigued by their growth,” said Colin Mackintosh, editor of the Cambridge Dictionary.
“The data reflects this, with the Cambridge Dictionaries website seeing a surge in searches for the word ‘parasocial’.”
From Taylor Swift to IShowSpeed
The number of searches for this word increased sharply in June, when the streamer appeared IShowSpeed seems to have blocked the fan who wrote a long chain of emotional posts addressed to the streamer and called themselves IShowSpeed’s “#1 parasocial people.”
News Taylor Swift engagement soccer star Travis Kelce via Instagram post also sparked strong feelings about the pop star's big moment, leading some to call the relationship between Swift and her fans parasocial.
The use of artificially intelligent chatbots as friends, confidants or even romantic connections over the summer also fueled conversations about people's reliance on communication algorithms and prompted the dictionary to update the definition of the word to include AI companions.
Veronica LaMarche, a psychologist and senior lecturer at the University of Essex whose work has studied parasocial relationships, says it's interesting to see the word getting its day in the sun, although the type of relationship it describes isn't necessarily new.
The term was coined in the 1950s by sociologists Donald Horton and Richard Wohl, who sought to describe the perceived relationships television viewers had with on-screen personalities. But Cambridge delays the start of such relationships even further, defining the first parasocial relationship as one that many fans had with Lord Byron, the British poet and satirist who was considered one of the first real celebrities.
Where does fandom end and parasociality begin?
LaMarche cites examples of parasocial relationships with stars such as Swift or Lily Allen, another pop singer who released detailed album about her divorce from actor David Harbor in October, help illustrate the difference between being interested in a celebrity and an actual parasocial relationship.
Beyond simply being interested in the lives of celebrities, parasocial relationships make people feel like they are actually part of that person's world and experience.
“The same way you feel excited about a friend who's going through an engagement, or really angry about a friend who's going through a bad breakup, you know you feel it on behalf of someone you've never met,” she said.
The third edition of the University of British Columbia Dictionary of Canadianism has added 137 new terms just in time for Canada Day.
Although parasocial relationships are often viewed negatively, LaMarche says they can actually play an important role in our social lives.
She says parasocial connections can be used to improve our social lives—for example, as a means of finding connection when friends or family members are unavailable or when we're going through a particularly lonely time.
“The only thing that is important is to remember that they do not completely replace our close relationships,” LaMarche said.
Second place
Runners-up for Cambridge's Word of the Year were “pseudonymization” (which describes the process in which information is codified by turning something like a name or address into a number to protect personal information) and “memification” (turning an event, person, image or anything else into an Internet joke).
Earlier this year Dictionary.com named “6-7” its word of the year.. It can be used to say “so-so” or “maybe this, maybe that,” but it also often means nothing at all—and it has caught on among school-aged children, much to the dismay of their parents and teachers.
