clickbait
UK/ˈklɪkbeɪt/
clickbait noun: website content that is aimed at generating advertising revenue, especially at the expense of quality or accuracy, relying on sensationalist headlines to attract click-throughs; such headlines.
Noun
clickbait (countable and uncountable, plural clickbaits)
- Website content that is aimed at generating advertising revenue, especially at the expense of quality or accuracy, relying on sensationalist headlines to attract click-throughs; such headlines.
- Fairfax's sites are renowned for what is sometimes called ‘clickbait’: headlines written to beguile passing eyeballs but which obscure nondescript or irrelevant stories.2012, Gideon Haigh, The Deserted Newsroom, Penguin, →ISBN
- "His careful lawyerly writing would be out of fashion now", wrote one commenter after Kettle's piece. "It wasn't clickbait".2013 September 29, Peter Preston, The Observer
Verb
clickbait (third-person singular simple present clickbaits, present participle clickbaiting, simple past and past participle clickbaited)
- To add clickbait to a web page; to direct clickbait at someone.
- Whether they're acts of clickbaiting or dumbness, internet headlines routinely mischaracterize quotes, inaccurately paraphrase statements, and misuse specific terms, all to make readers click.2015, How to Write About Music, →ISBN, page 60
- But he'd clickbaited her.2017, Ainslie Paton, The Love Experiment, →ISBN
Examples of clickbait in a sentence
- In August 2016, leaders at Facebook announced a plan to identify and limit clickbait, because the Facebook newsfeed goal is to “show people the stories most relevant to them.”2017, Ted Kwartler, Text Mining in Practice with R, John Wiley & Sons, →ISBN:
- In comparison with algorithms used in the past, this SI based technique provided a better accuracy and a human interpretable set of rules to classify clickbaits2019, Deepanshu Pandey, Garimendra Verma, Sushama Nagpal, “Clickbait Detection Using Swarm Intelligence”, in Advances in Signal Processing...
- I have never clickbaited anyone with overexaggerated titles, but also never downplayed the severity of the content within.2017, Brian Whitney, Subversive: Interviews with Radicals, →ISBN:
Synonyms of clickbait
Forms of clickbait
| Noun | |
|---|---|
| plural | clickbaits |
| alternative form | click-bait |
| alternative form | click bait |
| Verb | |
| third-person singular present | clickbaits |
| present participle | clickbaiting |
| past participle | clickbaited |
| past | clickbaited |
Origin of clickbait
From click + -bait (“manipulation to elicit a particular response”).
Words formed from clickbait
Questions about clickbait
- What does clickbait mean?
- Clickbait means website content that is aimed at generating advertising revenue, especially at the expense of quality or accuracy, relying on sensationalist headlines to attract click-throughs; such headlines.
- How do you use clickbait in a sentence?
- In August 2016, leaders at Facebook announced a plan to identify and limit clickbait, because the Facebook newsfeed goal is to “show people the stories most relevant to them.”
- What part of speech is clickbait?
- Clickbait can be a noun or a verb.
- How do you pronounce clickbait?
- Clickbait is pronounced /ˈklɪkbeɪt/ (UK).
- What is the plural of clickbait?
- The plural of clickbait is clickbaits.
Words near clickbait in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: clickbait (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
Last updated:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-clickbait.wav.
Cite this entry: “clickbait.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/clickbait. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.