Few cultural moments defined 2025 more intensely than the public reaction to Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s engagement. The spike in online attention and emotional responses helped push Cambridge Dictionary to select parasocial as its Word of the Year for 2025.

Cambridge defines “parasocial” as an adjective describing the felt connection a person experiences toward a public figure they do not actually know — the type of one-sided bond that surfaced repeatedly as fans and casual observers reacted to the couple’s announcement.

The choice reflects multiple trends from the year. Searches for the term surged after the engagement announcement on August 26, 2025, when Swift and Kelce posted photos of the proposal on Instagram with the caption, “Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married.” The post accumulated more than 14 million likes within its first hour, and social feeds across the world filled with celebratory, tearful and highly engaged responses.

Cambridge also cited growing unease about highly personalized AI chatbots and other episodes of intense fan behavior in 2025 — including heightened attention around a prominent streamer’s breakup earlier in the summer — as contributing factors in the selection.

For many longtime Swift fans, the engagement produced a particularly powerful reaction. Over nearly two decades, Swift’s songwriting has chronicled romantic highs and hardships in vivid detail, making the real-life moment feel like the culmination of a narrative many followers have followed closely.

Social posts captured that mix of joy and incredulity. One fan posted a celebratory GIF and declared they were overjoyed for their “close and personal friend” Taylor Swift, while others joked that their phones lit up as if they were the ones who’d become engaged.

Cambridge Dictionary has released a Word of the Year since 2015. In 2024 it chose “manifest,” following 2023’s selection of “hallucinate.” On the 2025 shortlist were terms such as “pseudonymization” and “memeify.”

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