Cambridge Dictionary has chosen its word of the year, and it surprisingly calls out every person who lives and worships celebrity culture. The dictionary has announced the word "parasocial" as "Word of the Year" for the year 2025.The dictionary defines "parasocial" as,"Denoting a relationship characterized by a one-sided, unreciprocated sense of intimacy felt by a fan or follower for a well-known or prominent figure (typically a media celebrity), in which the fan or follower comes to feel that they know the celebrity as a friend."And it can be easily said that 2025 was the year when parasocial, a word coined in 1956, relationships were on the rise, with Swifties crying over Taylor Swift's engagement to Travis Kelce, while K-pop fans were upset over the W magazine breast cancer gala controversy. The year was filled with such moments, and usually celebrity breakups, award wins, arrests and deaths bring out these parasocial emotions.Why is Parasocial connected to IShowSpeed?In a strange turn of events, YouTube streamer IShowSpeed may just be the cause behind this selection. This all goes back to an incident that took place in June, where IShowSpeed's fan, X user @wynzmanz, who was part of his fandom Speed Gang, created an entire thread detailing his past relationship with Vanessa. She compiled photos as "evidence" of the fact that the two belonged together and posted them with the captions,"To Darren Watkins: a thread of the girl who truly liked you 🇱🇦💔💌 It’s over now, but you should know Vanessa had feelings for you all along. She never stopped. For months, she dropped hint after hint, hoping you'd notice, but you never did. I’ve gathered them all here for you.She pulled screenshots and past videos, "I know it began as a collab. The day you streamed with her, she posted this tt. She called it one of the best experiences, said you pushed her to improve her tt and launch a YouTube. She even stood up for you."She referred to herself as Speed's "number 1 parasocial," which is where things went downhill for her and led the Twitch streamer to block her. That moment also led to the rise of the usage of the word and how people started looking it up everywhere, making it one of the most searched definitions of 2025.The second surge came with the rise in the dependency on AI chatbots like OpenAI and X's Grok. Other words that had an impact this year were, slop, which means the content on the internet is of low quality, pseudonymization, which refers to the process in which information that relates to a particular person is changed to something that has no meaning to them, and last is memeify, which basically means the action of turning something into a meme.