parasocial
adjective
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 Cambridge Dictionary
is…
Word of the Year 2025
Why parasocial?
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.
Lookups of parasocial on the Cambridge Dictionary spiked on June 30, 2025, when the YouTube streamer IShowSpeed blocked a fan who identified as his “number 1 parasocial”.
A sustained trend in increased searches for parasocial had already begun, driven in part by debate on social platforms about the ethics of marketers and influencers who take advantage of parasocial relationships.
But in June, lookups also surged due to media coverage about Meta and OpenAI and the potential effect of their chatbots on children and mental health. By September of 2025, the Cambridge Dictionary definition of parasocial was updated to include the possibility of a relationship with an artificial intelligence.
AI bots have joined celebrities as objects of parasocial devotion.
What does it say about 2025?
In 2025, following the release of personalized AI chatbots by multiple companies in the preceding year, public discussion about the psychological impact of parasocial relationships expanded from being mainly about influencers and celebrities to including the benefits and dangers of chatbots. These two stories converged in the summer of 2025.
A fan of YouTube streamer IShowSpeed posted a thread about his breakup with singer Vanessa that was so unsettling that he blocked the fan on June 30. Her reaction, begging him to unblock her, his “number 1 parasocial”, went viral and caused a spike in lookups of parasocial on the Cambridge Dictionary.
June
2025
July
2025
xAI released a subscription version of its Grok chatbot with anime-type companions, which critics said fostered unhealthy parasocial relationships.
August
2025
August
2025
Following a congressional investigation in June, 44 United States attorneys general sent a letter to 13 companies that had developed AI chatbots, warning that they would be held accountable for their decisions if they did not build appropriate protections for minors against harmful “chatbot parasocial relationships”.
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. Posts by fans say “I’m not being parasocial about it” and talk about “a Swiftie being parasocial for ten minutes straight”.
In 2025, viral celebrity moments and AI chatbot controversies drove lookups of parasocial.
Worldwide lookups of the meaning of parasocial in 2025. Source: Google Trends
Colin McIntosh, Cambridge Dictionary Chief Editor, said:
Parasocial stood out in 2025 for several reasons. Public interest in the term increased massively this year, as we can see from our data: the number of searches for it in the Cambridge Dictionary as well as on Google spiked on several occasions. It’s interesting from a language point of view because it has made the transition from an academic term to one used by ordinary people in their social media posts. And it also captures the zeitgeist of 2025, as the public’s fascination with celebrities and their lifestyles continues to reach new heights.
Two centuries of parasocial relationships
Today, social media platforms vastly increase the reach of celebrities and put them directly in front of us in a way that seems intimate. But parasocial behaviour towards celebrities is at least as old as the early 19th century, starting with the authors of books! It increased in the 20th century along with the popularity of radio, cinema, and television stars.
Click on the dates below to find out more about these early early celebrity crushes.
Lord Byron
1812
Photoplay
1911
Para-social
1956
Beatlemania
1960s
Soap operas
1970s to today
Social media influencers
2000s to today
Individuals
Today
One of the first objects of parasocial fixation, Lord Byron (who, as a Cambridge University student, kept a pet bear) became an instant celebrity after the publication of his poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. He was swamped with letters, mostly from women, who felt a strong connection to him, or at least to his sensitive, brooding, romantic public persona. One such fan was Lady Caroline Lamb, who pursued Byron until finally meeting him and starting an actual relationship with him – it was very short-lived.
Lord Byron 1812
The birth of the movie industry also created movie stars. Fan magazines such as Photoplay were hugely successful publications. They included plot summaries and production notes, but it was celebrity profiles that drove sales. These “insider stories” about the daily lives of Hollywood favourites offered fans a chance to “get to know” their celebrity crushes – though many of the stories were pure fiction created by the marketing department.
Photoplay 1911
Para-social 1956
Social scientists Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl of the University of Chicago coined the term ‘para-social’ in their 1956 paper, “Mass Communication and Para-Social Interaction: Observations on Intimacy at a Distance”, in the academic journal Psychology: Interpersonal and Biological Processes. They describe how the mass media of the time gave viewers the illusion of having a face-to-face relationship with performers.
The popularity of British band the Beatles inspired many superfans to learn everything they possibly could about the group, and most chose a particular Beatle as the focus of their worship. The band’s security operation became huge and unsupportable, with obsessive fans of the “Fab Four” breaking into their hotel rooms or ambushing them at airports to try to get physically near them. In fact, security concerns were cited as one of the main reasons the band stopped touring.
Beatlemania 1960s
Soap operas 1970s to today
Though soap operas (open-ended daytime serial dramas) began on radio, the move to television made them an entertainment fixture around the world. Fans of soap operas identify with the characters not as glamorous stars, but as real people like themselves. A car accident in one episode of Britain’s "Coronation Street" left viewers longing to help in some way, as if the accident had happened to people they knew. In Peru, fans sympathized so strongly with a character from the telenovela “Ven Conmigo” that, following his admission that he could not read, nearly a million people enrolled in literacy classes throughout the region.
From pop music idols to influencers, content creators understand the power and importance of parasocial connection and now actively manage their fan interactions in the social media world. Taylor Swift is perhaps the most notable example, carefully crafting her social media presence to encourage and reinforce her fanbase’s sense of a personal relationship with her. The recent announcement – via Instagram – of her engagement to American football star Travis Kelce had fans around the world exploding with joy and excitement as if she were a close friend.
Social media influencers 2000s to today
Individuals today
Almost everyone who uses social media to any degree can cite friends or followers that they do not know personally but with whom they share a virtual bond. How many of the people that you follow on social media, or that follow you, are friends IRL?
Hear from Simone Schnall, Professor of Experimental Social Psychology, University of Cambridge
How and why people form parasocial relationships
Take a deeper look
at parasocial as a word
When parasocial was first coined by two social scientists in 1956, it was spelled para-social and mostly appeared in academic writing. Follow the story of how the word lost its hyphen, was added to the dictionary, and expanded in meaning.
Find out more
Our shortlist for Word of the Year
Just two other words besides parasocial were on the 2025 shortlist.
noun
pseudonymization
a process in which information that relates to a particular person, for example, a name or email address, is changed to a number or name that has no meaning so that it is impossible to see who the information relates to
memeify
verb
to turn an event, image, person, etc. into a meme (= an idea, joke, image, video, etc. that is spread very quickly on the internet)
Pseudonymization spiked in lookups on the Cambridge Dictionary in May. It’s a term that is central to discussions about how to protect personal data in a world where this information needs to be useful but not personally identifiable – especially in 2025, as the ethical training of AI models has featured frequently in the news. However, because we could not trace the spike to a specific event or identify any particular trend, there isn’t much of a story in the data for this hard-to-pronounce word.
Memeify captures the playful, viral creativity of internet culture. It highlights how memes, in the tradition of satire, are a mode of both entertainment and communication, blurring the lines between joke and journalism to reframe politics, identity, crises, and culture. Although this word also spiked in lookups, it just didn’t represent anything specific to 2025.
Words we’re watching
To be a candidate for the Word of the Year, a term has to actually be in the Cambridge Dictionary. We keep an eye on new words and meanings to see whether they have enough staying power to be chosen for the dictionary.
Glazing is the excessive use of praise or flattery, especially by AI chatbots, in a way that seems insincere and artificial. It is sometimes seen as a way of compensating for weak input from an AI. When the chatbot’s responses lean too far into glazing, it immediately sets off my alarm bells.
Here are some words and meanings we’ve been tracking in 2025:
Bias is the object of a fan’s stanning (= excessive devotion to a singer, band or other media star). It is used especially by fans of the South Korean music genre K-pop. My bias is V from BTS – he has the best outfits!
Vibey describes a place that has a good vibe. The place is vibey, has a great buzz, and is perfect for people watching.
Breathwork is a technique that involves the conscious control of your breathing and is intended to produce physical and mental benefits. People who practise breathwork say it eases stress and tension and can have life-changing results.
Doom spending is the activity of spending money that you do not have in order to make yourself feel better. People sometimes engage in it when they feel anxious and uncertain about the future. Although doom spending may provide short-term emotional relief, it can also have a long-term impact on your financial stability.
Learn about words on our blog
Read our Word of the Year blog post to find out more about parasocial and other related words.
Read the blog
Previous Word of the Year winners
2024 – manifest
2023 – hallucinate
2022 – homer
2021 – perseverance
2020 – quarantine
2019 – upcycling
2018 – nomophobia
2017 – populism
2016 – paranoia
2015 – austerity
Check out these past winners of the Cambridge Dictionary Word of the Year.
Lord Byron 1812
What did we learn
parasocial
about
?
Our team of lexicographers and editors are always alert to new words and meanings emerging in the English language. In 2023, we noticed the word parasocial popping up in news articles, social media posts, and online forums, so we started tracking it.
Evidence in the Cambridge corpus – a database of over 2 billion words – confirmed that this formerly academic word had truly entered the mainstream. It was added to the dictionary in August 2023 with the following definition:
involving or relating to a connection between a person and someone they do not know personally, for example a famous person or a character in a book
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
As well as adding new words to the dictionary, we also track how existing words are being used in new contexts. In 2025 we saw that it wasn’t only humans that could be the objects of parasocial relationships…
This resulted in the definition you see on the Cambridge Dictionary today, which was updated in September 2025:
But our story doesn’t end there.
The origins and evolution of parasocial
Parasocial was coined by Horton and Wohl in their 1956 article “Mass Communication and Para-Social Interaction” and is a combination of the adjective social and the Greek-derived prefix para-, which in this case means “similar to or parallel to, but separate from”.
The change from para-social to parasocial reflects a common trend in the spelling of prefixed or compound words. When new words are coined, it takes some time for people to become familiar with them. Writing them with hyphens helps people to work out the meaning based on their two parts. As time passes and the words become more familiar, these formerly hyphenated words start being written as a single word with no hyphen. In recent years this change has tended to take place first in American English, spreading to British English from there.
American English prefers makeup, whereas British English, according to corpus evidence, still prefers make-up, although makeup is becoming more and more frequent in British English and make-up is starting to appear old-fashioned.
We can find out a lot about parasocial by examining how it interacts with other words; we refer to this as its collocational patterning.
The Cambridge English Corpus shows us the most common collocates of parasocial. In addition, the internet provides a wealth of information about how parasocial behaves in context. The expanding set of collocates that our word is used with shows how the contexts in which it is used have changed over time.
Words used
with parasocial
Collocational patterns are the typical groupings of one word with the other words that it is closely associated with. They can take the form of adjective + noun, such as unbreakable bonds, or verb + noun, such as form a relationship.
In the original article by Horton and Wohl, parasocial is used to talk about the types of relationship between humans and unreal characters on television and radio. We notice in particular these collocations:
In 2025, these continue to be very frequently occurring collocations, particularly in more academic or technical contexts. But we also see other collocational phrases that refer to parasocial relationships:
By looking at the sources of these collocations, we can clearly see that parasocial is no longer confined to academic discussion; instead, we notice it being used more widely, in particular by younger people, on social media platforms, and in newspapers and magazines.
Also, whereas in the past the word was used to talk about relationships with fictional characters almost exclusively, nowadays it is far more often used to talk about perceived relationships with celebrities and, increasingly, with artificial intelligences.
As well as parasocial relationships, people are using parasocial to describe feelings. We see collocations like these being regularly used:
These also reflect the popular contexts the word is being used in. They employ the standard vocabulary used to talk about real human relationships, but transferred to the parasocial level.
A noticeable shift in recent years has been the tendency to use parasocial to describe the person who is the object of parasocial affection. These collocations have become common:
Discussion of the phenomenon of parasocial behaviour often focuses on perceived harms that it might cause.
Inevitably, the association of the parasocial with modern celebrity culture has resulted in a new set of collocations:
And finally, the harnessing of the parasocial to the world of business in the form of parasocial marketing (a form of marketing that exploits the relationships between celebrities and their fans in order to make money) is reflected in these collocations:
parasocial interaction
parasocial relationship
parasocial role
parasocial relations
parasocial bond
parasocial attachment
parasocial crush
parasocial connection
parasocial romance
parasocial friendship
parasocial breakup
parasocial situationship
parasocial heartbreak
parasocial feelings
parasocial jealousy
parasocial intimacy
parasocial obsession
parasocial love
parasocial grief
parasocial crush
parasocial boyfriend
parasocial girlfriend
parasocial friend
parasocial delusion
parasocial behaviour
parasocial experience
parasocial disorder
parasocial paranoia
parasocial fixation
parasocial psychosis
parasocial fandom
parasocial fan
parasocial hater
parasocial stalker
parasocial stalking
parasocial stan
parasocial content
parasocial dynamic
parasocial engagement
parasocial influencer
parasocial marketing
Parasocial as a noun?
Another development we’ve noticed is that people are beginning to use parasocial as a noun referring to a relationship or to a person. One of the ways in which parasocial came to our attention was when YouTube streamer IShowSpeed blocked a fan who identified as his “number 1 parasocial”. Another typical use of this would be “My parasocial is cheating on me.” In this case parasocial refers to the person who is the object of the fan’s attention, but it can also refer to the relationship, as in “I’ve been in a parasocial with this guy for years.”
This reflects a general tendency for adjectives to be deployed as nouns. Generally these start as clipped forms of phrases, and they are often used humorously or as a slang form that is used by a particular social or professional group. Examples include random, a humorous way of referring to a random person, originally a slang term used by young people but now found more widely, or domestic, originally British police slang for domestic incident.
There is still quite limited evidence for the use of parasocial as a noun, although it is a definite trend, so it has not yet been added to the dictionary. We will keep an eye on this development, however, and add it if it appears to be something more long-lasting.
In terms of meaning, the evolution of parasocial follows a pattern seen in many technical or specialist words. As specialist subject areas become better known to the general public, a process known as popularization, the technical vocabulary of that subject area becomes familiar, and may also start to be applied by non-specialists to areas beyond its original use. Terms from science that have undergone this transition include algorithm, meme, DNA, and food chain. Parasocial is following a well-trodden path.
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My parasocial is cheating on me.
e-mail
email
week-end
weekend
make-up
makeup
She speaks candidly about infatuation and parasocial connections with celebrities.
That was when I realized that what I was experiencing was parasocial grief.
Studies show that parasocial interactions can give your brand the perception of authenticity.
A healthy parasocial relationship can give you strength and inspiration.
Some mental health professionals worry that social media can encourage parasocial behaviour.
Psychologists discovered some time ago that people can engage in parasocial relationships with fictional characters.
Adapted search results for parasocial in the Cambridge English Corpus.
Source: Google search results
Source: Google search results