Feel connected to a celebrity you’ve never met in person? “Parasocial” has been crowned Cambridge Dictionary’s Word of the Year, highlighting the rise in “unhealthy” and “one-sided” relationships with celebrities, influencers and even AI chatbots.
The word is used to describe a relationship (or Parasocial Relationship – “PSR”) in which a person feels like they know a celebrity on a personal level even though they have never met them.
It’s only the second time that an adjective has been crowned Word of the Year, following “paranoid” in 2016, and Cambridge Dictionary defines this year’s word as: “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 coined in 1956 by sociologists Donald Horton and Richard Wohl, who wanted to describe how television viewers formed “para-social” relationships with TV personalities.
Since then, the phenomenon – linked to the language of fandom – has grown exponentially, as social media continues to foster parasocial relationships with celebrities, influencers and online personalities that people have no personal connection to in the real world. Delving into why they chose “parasocial” as their Word of the Year, Cambridge Dictionary states: “As social media intensifies the intimacy that fans feel with their adored celebrities, and with the rise in popularity of AI companions that can take on personalities, the word for these one-way relationships – parasocial – is having its own moment.”
Colin McIntosh, Cambridge Dictionary Chief Editor, said the word “captures the 2025 zeitgeist” and demonstrates how language changes.
The use of the term has surged this year, particularly as concerns over the connections that some people have started to develop with AI chatbots.
Simone Schnall, professor of experimental social psychology at the University of Cambridge, said that the rise of parasocial relationships “has redefined fandom, celebrity and, with AI, how ordinary people interact online.”
Cambridge Dictionary also highlighted a number of other words that had a “significant impact” this year and made their shortlist.
Among them are “pseudonymization” (a process in which information that relates to a particular person is changed to a number or name that has no meaning so that it is impossible to see who the information relates to); “slop” (“content on the internet that is of very low quality, especially when it is created by artificial intelligence”); and “memeify” (“to turn an event, image, person, etc. into a meme”).
(euronews.)
Tuesday, February 24, 2026