Jugendwort 2026: Germany's Youth Word of the Year Is "Ragebait"

It is "Ragebait". German dictionary publisher PONS Langenscheidt announced the Jugendwort des Jahres 2026 on Saturday, October 10, 2026, at the Frankfurt Book Fair (Frankfurter Buchmesse). Ragebait won with 36.5% of the final vote, ahead of "Peak" (33.8%) and "Crashout" (29.7%). Sources: ZDFheute, SRF.

Jugendwort des Jahres translates as "youth word of the year". It is a yearly vote run by Langenscheidt since 2008 to pick the slang term that best sums up how German-speaking teenagers talk. It is separate from the adult "Wort des Jahres" chosen by the Society for the German Language. Source: Wikipedia.

Because German youth slang borrows heavily from English internet culture. All three finalists, Ragebait, Peak and Crashout, are English, and so were recent winners such as "cringe" (2021), "smash" (2022), "goofy" (2023) and "Aura" (2024). German media gloss Ragebait as "Wut-Köder", literally "anger bait". Sources: ZDFheute, 20 Minuten (dpa).

It is the same term, chosen independently. Oxford University Press named "rage bait" its Word of the Year 2025 on December 1, 2025, after a public vote of more than 30,000 people (the other finalists were "aura farming" and "biohack"). Oxford defines it as online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage, typically to drive traffic or engagement, and said usage roughly tripled in a year. German teenagers picked the same word ten months later. Source: Oxford University Press.

The vote is open to young people aged 11 to 20, online on Langenscheidt's site. The publisher says close to a million took part in 2026. Ages are self-declared, though: a spokesperson said the publisher has to rely on participants giving their age truthfully. Sources: ZDFheute, 20 Minuten (dpa).

Suggestions opened on May 29, 2026. A jury turned them into a top 10 (Ragebait, "Du bist gut genug", "Gute Käse", "Macker", Crashout, "Schere", "Süper", "Digga", "67" and Peak), which went to a public vote. The top 3 were revealed on August 28 and the final round closed on September 28. Sources: netzwelt, 20 Minuten (dpa).

2025: das crazy. 2024: Aura. 2023: goofy. 2022: smash. 2021: cringe. 2020: lost. There was no winner in 2019, after PONS took over Langenscheidt. Earlier picks include "Ehrenmann/Ehrenfrau" (2018), "I bims" (2017), "Smombie" (2015) and "YOLO" (2012). Sources: 20 Minuten (dpa), Wikipedia.

She is a newsreader on Tagesschau, Germany's flagship evening news, and since 2021 she has explained the youth word in deadpan videos on the show's social channels. On October 9, a day before the result, she posted a video in which she started to reveal the winner, checked her calendar and realised she was a day early. She never said the word, but commenters promptly called her the "Ragebait queen". Sources: 20 Minuten (dpa), ms-aktuell.

Yes. Critics have long called it a marketing campaign for Langenscheidt's slang dictionary and questioned whether some winners were ever widely used. Hamburg linguist Jannis Androutsopoulos says Ragebait has already moved beyond social media into everyday speech, which is when a word can really claim to be youth language. Sources: Wikipedia, ZDFheute.