60. WORD OF THE YEAR: PARASOCIAL

Every year, the Cambridge Dictionary chooses a 'Word of the Year', a linguistic snapshot of the cultural forces shaping our world. In 2025, the standout term is parasocial, a word that perfectly sums up how much our emotional lives have blurred with the digital world around us.

Nothing new

Coined by sociologists in the 1950s, parasocial initially described the one-sided emotional bonds people formed with TV personalities. But in today's extra-connected era, the term has taken on new relevance. We now build attachments to influencers, streamers, celebrities, fictional characters and, increasingly, AI companions. These relationships feel personal, comforting, familiar, maybe even intimate, yet they flow in one direction.

For many people, the first exposure to the phenomenon came with the 2000 single Stan, in which an obsessive fan of Eminem becomes increasingly angry at his idol's lack of response to his letters. The titular Stan ultimately kills himself in a car accident while ranting about Eminem. But modern parasocial networks, such as K-pop fans, have taken the song in their stride: 'stan' has become a term of self-identity for excessively avid online fans.

Why now?

Perhaps the surge in interest around the word parasocial reflects a shifting social reality. A 2021 study in The Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, for instance, suggests the COVID-19 pandemic as a major turning point. When in lockdown, the cognitive distinctions between social and parasocial interactions were no longer as well-defined and there were greater similarities in processing the social engagement of friends and media persona. In other words, when the only way to interact with others is through a screen, social engagement becomes much more similar to parasocial engagement.

As such, the choice of parasocial is about more than online fandom culture. It captures:

• Digital loneliness: as traditional social circles shrink, online personalities offer a sense of companionship.
• Influencer trust: people are willing to take advice, buy products, and form strong opinions based on individuals they don't personally know.
• AI relationships: chatbots and virtual companions are making 'one-sided' relationships feel surprisingly two-sided.

In a way, it's surprising that it's taken this long for parasocial to have its moment, considering that parasocial networks have been having a real-world impact for at least five years. During the George Floyd protests, for example, K-pop stans flooded hashtags like #BlueLivesMatter with images and videos of K-pop artists in order to drown out those using the hashtags to oppose the Black Lives Matter movement. Similarly, when the Dallas Police Department asked people on Twitter to submit videos of protesters, their app crashed due to a tsunami of K-pop fan videos. Perhaps it's not all bad.

- Josh