There are few moments that disrupted the news cycle in 2025 more than Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce‘s engagement announcement, with the internet freaking out for days on end after the fact — and that’s exactly why The Cambridge Dictionary chose the term it did to represent this year in the history books.
As recently announced, the organization’s 2025 Word of the Year is “parasocial,” thanks in part to the overwhelming emotional response online to Tayvis’ big news in August, largely from people who’ve never met either the pop star or the Kansas City Chiefs tight end. The site defines the term as an adjective “involving or relating to a connection that someone feels between themselves and a famous person they do not know.”
“Global coverage of the way in which Taylor Swift announced her engagement to Travis Kelce caused lookups of parasocial to surge as the media dissected fans’ reactions,” the Cambridge Dictionary explained of its 2025 selection. “Posts by fans say ‘I’m not being parasocial about it’ and talk about ‘a Swiftie being parasocial for 10 minutes straight.’”
Other factors that informed the choice were the wave of concern in 2025 about eerily personal artificial intelligence chatbots as well as one viral fan’s reaction to a YouTube streamer by the name of IShowSpeed breaking up with his girlfriend in June.
Indeed, there were many fan displays of cheers and tears on Aug. 26, 2025, when Swift and Kelce shared photos of the proposal on Instagram. “Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married,” they captioned the post, which received more than 14 million “likes” on Instagram within one hour.
For many longtime Swifties, it was impossible not to have a deep emotional reaction to the news. For nearly two decades, they’d been listening to the 14-time Grammy winner sing in detail about her trials and tribulations with love, making her real-life fairytale ending — such as the one she sang about in 2008 on smash hit “Love Story” — feel extra special, parasocialism be damned.
“I AM SO HAPPY FOR MY CLOSE AND PERSONAL FRIEND TAYLOR SWIFT,” one fan wrote shortly after the couple’s post, sharing a gif of a little girl screaming.
“the way my phone was blowing up you’d think I was the one who got engaged,” someone else added at the time.
The Cambridge Dictionary has been choosing a Word of the Year since 2015. In 2024, the institution selected “manifest,” which followed “hallucinate” the year prior.
Also in 2025, “pseudonymization” and “memeify” were on the shortlist for the Word of the Year title.
