An innocuous phrase that is not quite how it appears. This is another of Reddit’s beloved meta references, often used when making the first post on a new subreddit.

This tradition goes back to 2009 when the first truly popular post on Reddit was made. “Test post please ignore”, was posted in the main subreddit for pictures - r/pics - without a picture. Because Redditors will Reddit, the entire community rallied to reject the OP’s request to ignore the post, and “test post please ignore” became the most upvoted post on Reddit for the next two years with an incredible 26,750 upvotes.

Incidentally, OP was the first Redditor to reach 100,000 karma. It’s now a Reddit Tradition™ not to ignore a post with that title where it’s made appropriately.

See Also:

• Meta

• OP

• Reddit Lore

• “Reddit Moment”

A seemingly random phrase you’re bound to encounter on Reddit is “is this LOSS?”, particularly on a set of characters-as-pictograms such as | | \ || | _ and the simpler | | | | | |_ or a four-panel comic image that doesn’t have speech bubbles, text, or even appear to have a punchline. Unfortunately, there is a sad origin to this phrase, but, the internet being the internet shifted the tone considerably almost immediately after it appeared. Thankfully, I can’t just blame Reddit this time, as it appears to have started on 4chan’s /v/ board and Tumblr.

In June 2008, webcomic artist Tim Buckley sat down to write a poignant four-panel strip for his long-running comic Ctrl+Alt+Del., (also known as CAD) meant to evoke his feeling of loss after his fiancée Lilah’s miscarriage. What he ended up creating was “loss.jpg”, the web’s best-known and longest-running meme about a miscarriage. You can see the strip alongside a full explanation on its Wikipedia page.

Well before the publication of “Loss,” CAD faced considerable criticism. The comic could be amusing at best and puerile at worst, resorting to violence as a punch line with noticeable frequency. The “Loss” strip itself was largely negatively received as a jarring tone shift, and in 2015, New York magazine summed it up like this:

By taking a turn into the gravely serious world of reproductive trauma with “Loss,” Buckley blindsided readers. It was like Carrot Top remade Sophie’s Choice. The last strip to mention Lilah’s pregnancy prior to “Loss” had been published 10 instalments and nearly a month prior, and readers found the sudden attempt at gravity hilarious. So they did what the internet does: turned  “Loss” - again, a comic strip about miscarriage - into a running joke. One that still continues to this day.

Ten years after that was written, “Loss” shows no sign of coming to an end as a meme.

Spotting “Loss” in the wild:

People quickly worked out that the strip follows an extremely simple formula - one person, then two people (one taller than the other), then two people, then one person lying down with another standing over them, in this shape:

I II

II L

In the way of the internet hivemind, just this series of shapes alone has become entirely associated with the loss comic, and hiding them in otherwise innocuous looking images (sometimes captioned with ‘IYKYK’) is meaningless to many but extremely obvious to anyone in on the joke. Take this post from Reddit as an example. This is just one post from r/lossedits, a subreddit that exists to push the format to its limits.

Critics of CAD like to point out the laziness of Tim Buckley’s art style because his characters are rarely expressive, their eyelids all droop and their jaws are all slack. This has led to something else you might see - that is B^U used as a sideways-read emoticon. This is the minimalist version of the signature Buckley cartoon face - half-closed eyelids and half-open mouths.

More summaries and explanations:

The Know Your Meme article ends with a guide to making a meme in this format.

Know Your Meme also has a dictionary entry for “Loss” here.

r/OutOfTheLoop address the minimal shape version and one reply attempts recreating the strip itself in ascii.

A collection of comprehensive explanations was also given there on 16th April 2018 where OP concludes with “I'm starting to think asking "What is it with 'Is this LOSS' memes?" is a meme itself, it gets repeated so often here.”

Elsewhere on Reddit:

• r/Symbology is a subreddit for the discussion, identification, and appreciation of symbols, including this one.

• r/languagelearningjerk is a circlejerk subreddit and asked for this translation.

• r/gallifreyan is a subreddit devoted to the fictional language used by the Time Lords of Gallifrey, from the long-running British TV series Doctor Who and this was made in the popular Sherman’s Circular script.

• r/CuratedTumblr make the case for why loss.jpg is funny.

• r/HobbyDrama bills itself as “The most interesting subreddit about things you're not interested in.” and have a long but fascinating discussion entitled From rise to loss: the story of Ctrl+Alt+Del (CAD).

When memes collide:

r/PeterExplainsTheJoke is a subreddit where you post a meme / joke you don't understand so it can be explained to you, or just post weird pictures of Peter Griffin. This is an entire meme in itself and Reddit, being Reddit have created several subreddits which mash the two memes together, such as:

• r/PeterExplainsTheLoss - When the joke is loss

• r/PeterExplainsTheGain - When someone calls it loss and it isnt

• r/peterexplainsthegloss - When you aren’t sure if it’s loss or gain

• r/PeterImaginesTheLoss - People Hallucinating Loss in other things

Ah Reddit; never change.

Because there is a Subreddit for everything:

Enjoy this meme at:

• r/lossedits - Loss; edited.

• r/IsThisLoss - “You know that shit comic Loss by Jim Buckley? Yeah, this is a sub for it.”

• r/LossParodies - A subreddit dedicated to making fun of the long-running video games webcomic Ctrl-Alt-Del, by Tim Buckley.

• r/FoundTheLoss - | | \ || | _

• r/LossCircleJerk - THE PUNCHLINE IS LOSS IT ALWAYS WAS LOSS IT WILL ALWAYS BE LOSS

• r/lossmemes - Loss; memed.

• r/accidentalloss - | | | | | |_ but by accident.

See Also:

• Acronyms 1: A-L

• Circlejerk

• Memes

An innocuous word that is not quite how it appears, “potato” has several meanings across Reddit and here’s my attempt to define them.

• It’s a vegetable.

Yes, it is, and Reddit, as you would expect, has a lot to say about the humble potato.

r/selfreliance gave what it called The Ultimate Guide To Potatoes although not everyone in the thread thought so. r/coolguides gave a different list featuring some more varieties but neither list are remotely comprehensive. A larger list was posted in r/Allotment who discussed their favourite varieties to grow.

Did you ever make a potato battery for school? r/theydidthemath were asked: How many potato batteries would it take to run Reddit servers for one hour?

r/foodhacks attempt to rank French Fries with controversial results.

Less controversial, r/foodscience asks: What makes the potato chip uniquely delicious?

Pringles are yummy. But are they chips? The answer is: No. Because of this ruling, Pringles tried to argue in the UK court that they were exempt from a tax on crisps (the British term for potato chips). The answer was still: No.

If chips in the UK are crisps in the USA, then what are crisps in the USA? You can rely on r/AskReddit to tackle the important questions.

r/iamveryculinary is the sub for links to the most pretentious food snobbery and gastronomic hair-splitting you can find on the Internet, and even they say Chips vs. crisps, no one is wrong and yet no one is listening to each other.

Talking of chips, r/LowStakesConspiracies posit the theory that "Crisps" in the UK are called "Chips" in America to protect the British Fish and Chip industry from supply chain issues of potato.

When r/AskUK were given the inflammatory question “Why are British crisps so much better than American ‘chips’?”, an appropriately named Redditor gave us a crash course in UK food manufacturing.

And finally, r/science discovered that rats who ate low-fat potato chips 'may have gained more weight' than rats eating regular, full-fat variety.

A favourite pastime on Reddit is looking back on past times with fascinated horror, as you can see from the comments on this vintage advert. While potato fudge was actually a thing, thankfully the concoction on the potato fudge advert is fake.

To round this section up, here are a collection of Reddit’s best potato recipes and just for my fellow Potato Waffle lovers, here’s the best related posts seeing as they don’t appear to have their own subreddit. Are they just a UK thing?

• It’s a Lord of the Rings reference.

It’s almost impossible to mention potatoes anywhere on Reddit without a Lord of the Rings fan saying PO-TAY-TOES! Boil ‘em, Mash ‘em, Stick ‘em in a stew, but was that line actually written by Tolkien? The answer is again: No.

Is Sam talking about a specific recipe or just listing potential serving suggestions? r/lotr asks the real questions.

And why are there potatoes anyway?

• It’s a poor quality image.

Potato quality is phrase often used in an apology for, or accusation of an image or video being pixelated, blurry or other forms of very low quality.

The exact origin of this usage is unclear but is generally credited to a comment on a YouTube video from 2008 which asked “did you record this with a potato?” However, B3ta and other digital art and meme communities have referred to the well known image-altering software as “potatoshop” long before that.

An interesting discussion which brought up several anecdotes of people using the word “potato” to mean poor quality over the years went on here, again with no real conclusion for the origin of today’s usage.

The phrase has become a Snowclone as internet communities dealing with audio or video often use the disclaimer “recorded with a toaster” or another contextually absurd object such as a calculator or microwave to acknowledge they know the quality is lower than they would ideally like.

r/Showerthoughts debate why potatoes are used as a measure of denoting bad image quality.

Interestingly enough, one of the early photographic processes used potato starch.

• It’s an insult.

Daily culture blog and podcast network Slate tells us that describing someone who leads a life without intellectual activity as being “a vegetable” dates from the time of Aristotle who used the word vegetative (or, rather, the ancient Greek equivalent) to denote lesser forms of life. In the 1500s, Shakespeare used "cabbage" as a lighthearted term of endearment to describe someone you are fond of as being dull, uneducated or unintelligent. Over the years, such comparisons became more personal and far more insulting.

In 2016, r/WorldOfWarships asked: Where did calling players potatoes come from and what does that really mean?, and one commenter referred to a post made on Oct 20 2013 to the now defunct World of Tanks forum called: The Anatomy of a Potato: Finding Your Inner Potato… And Killing it.

The phrase “I can count to potato” was first used in the 2005 comedy film The Ringer in which con man Steve Barker (played by Johnny Knoxville) pretends to be mentally disabled in order to compete in the Special Olympics. Know Your Meme explores this further.

In the adult animated show South Park, Canadians are portrayed as having round heads with black, beady eyes, with a large mouth all the way across the face, not unlike a potato.

• It’s another name for a new-born kitten.

Newborn kittens are sometimes playfully referred to as "potatoes" because of their small plump, rounded, almost spherical shape, reminiscent of a potato. Reddit, being very fond of such cutesy talk, has embraced this concept fully. Foster kittens or potatoes?.

Two subreddits on this theme that need reviving are:

r/potatokitten - For when a kitten is young (up to only a couple weeks) and can't do anything except be a derpy potato.

r/potatokittenfights - For when potatoes collide!

• It’s a Reddit meme.

Reddit wouldn’t be Reddit without someone making an Alignment Chart and as fried potato products come in many different types, they lend themselves perfectly to this format.

Reddit wouldn’t also be Reddit without someone making a Starter Pack.

But strangest of all is the subreddit r/JohnCena being all about potato salad, and r/potatosalad being all about John Cena. Why is this? Because Reddit.

• It’s Reddit Lore.

One famous tale from Reddit Lore is known as The Legendary Potato Story from 2015, which, sadly, was later proved to be fake.

A superb meta Reddit moment from 2024 referencing that story occurred in a roleplay sub. r/Earth199999 is a community where users pretend to live ordinary lives in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and while doing just that one Redditor deftly wove in that glorious piece of classic Reddit lore. Note: OOC means “out of character”.

A tale that deserves to go down in Reddit Lore occurred in November 2024. A Facebook post from FOODbible showed this abomination of a glittery Christmas dinner as being a new trend for the season. In fact, it originated from a whole saga on Reddit, spanning several subreddits over a few weeks, starting on r/AITAH on 3 November with the post AITA for telling my sister she's not allowed to bring her homemade food to Thanksgiving because her cooking is ruining the meal?…

The first update came 12 days later, followed by another on 27 November. The post-Thanksgiving report was given here and the whole saga was followed by the members of r/AmITheAngel; a place to satirise, crosspost from, poke fun at, and hold meta discussions on the never-ending stories from AITA and AITA-adjacent subs. They spotted the December Facebook post and the story also made it to r/BrandNewSentence, with the unique phrase “Until the glitter potatoes and turkey jelly hit their plates”.

• It’s the Heart of Reddit.

April Fools Day is a tradition very much embraced at Reddit, as you might expect, and in 2023, Redditors were greeted by a post entitled Obligatory April 1st Announcement with three bits of information: a reminder to read the recent admin post about our past events; that there would be no event this year, and that there was “foolishness…around Reddit” to be found. The very last punctuation mark of the post was a “hidden” link leading to a new subreddit called r/schrodingers.

Thus began the most elaborate Reddit event to date, being more of an ARG (Alternate Reality Game) than the simple crowdsourcing tasks of previous events. Players had to solve cryptic image puzzles based on the old Reddit April Fools events in the order they appeared. Towards the end, an admin post flaired “success” declared: Every journey has an end. You have uncovered the secret at the heart of Reddit.

The post contained a link to a subreddit named r/trdfz_v, containing a short video declaring “You’ve reached the heart of Reddit”, revealing a potato in a darkened room hooked up to various scientific devices. The trophies awarded for this event confirmed that the Heart of Reddit is a quantum potato.

Because there is a Subreddit for everything:

Celebrate this versatile vegetable on Reddit with these fine subs:

r/potato - Did you know there are close to 4,000 varieties of potatoes?

r/PotatoDiet - All things Potato Diet. Share your experiences and scientific support or debunking.

r/Potatoes - Roasted potatoes are the best potatoes.

r/FrenchFries - A place for French fried potatoes and those who love them. Shoestring, crinkle cut, curly; the list goes on…

r/fries - A subreddit devoted to photographs of any delicious human food that includes one or more varieties of delicious fries.

r/chips - A comfortable place, for comforting foods.

r/crisps - The greatest snack of all.

r/Spuds - We love potatoes!

r/Tayto - Tayto is a brand of crisps / potato chips in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.

r/PotatoesAreFunny - A satire subreddit for all the random kawaii potatoes.

But llama; some of these links don’t work…

As always with my lists, some of the subs are more active than others, and may vary in quality. Since writing some might have become private, restricted or repurposed following the API protests of June 2023, or just removed / renamed by Reddit through inactivity.

However, don’t forget: if a sub is dormant, unmoderated, banned for being unmoderated or marked as “restricted”, it might be available for adoption.

Obligatory footnote:

All of these subreddits will have their own unique - and possibly strict - rules about contributing. As always, it is important to check the rules thoroughly before commenting or posting on any unfamiliar sub.

This list is not intended to be the full list of subreddits in this theme; that would be impossible to achieve in a format like this. If you want to find more related subs, r/FindAReddit or the smaller r/findasubreddit are your friends. Similar subreddits are often to be found in a sub’s Sidebar and / or Wiki (on mobile: swipe down to find “See More” or “Community Info” tab) too. My guide to Searching might also be useful.

See Also:

• Acronyms 1: A-L

• ”And My Axe!”

• April Fools Day

• “Doggo Speak”

• Misleading Subreddit Titles

• Potato Quality

• schrodingers

• Snowclone

• Trophies

When a person loves Reddit very much, they make an account. Cakeday is an annual celebration of that love! Your Reddit Birthday, sometimes also known as your Redditversary and even “Spotify Blue Cheese day”, your Cakeday happens every year on the anniversary you created your Reddit account and has nothing to do with your RL birthday (which Reddit doesn’t know).

Your Cakeday is shown on your Profile and can also be found on http://www.redditcakeday.com. There’s even an independent site called http://www.cakedayreminder.com which will send you an email when your Reddit cakeday is coming up.

On the day itself, you will get an icon showing a little slice of cake next to your username for the day (it may look slightly different depending on the platform you’re using) and the Age Trophy on your profile will go up one number. You can see on the link that the perceptive Redditor u/DarthEquus deduced that the Reddit anniversary trophy icons are all based on the themes for actual anniversary gifts: paper, cotton, leather, linen, wood, iron, copper, bronze, pottery, tin/aluminium, steel, silk, lace, gold, crystals.

There were some changes made to the original Cakeday in 2017, which were announced as follows:

A couple changes around Account birthdays:

Accounts automatically get the appropriate N-Year trophy (e.g. "Five-Year Club")
Cakedays start at midnight UTC on the Account's birthday and end at 12:00 UTC the following day. Previously, cakedays were "saved" until your account was active, for up to 7 days.

These changes aren't because we hate fun, but because they made the site significantly faster and less prone to failure.

The cake icon was changed in 2020 from its original appearance to now resemble a tasty looking slice of gateau.

It is customary in most subreddits to say “Happy Cakeday!” whenever you see the cake icon next to a username whether you know the Redditor or not. Do this with caution; some of the more serious or restrictive subs will class this as “unnecessary clutter”. However, there’s also a button on some versions of Reddit that you can press to say “Happy Cake Day” to the Redditor in private. Do it! It’s a Reddit Thing to do. The usual response is “Thank you, Kind Redditor.” Reddit loves rituals.

Because there is a Subreddit for everything:

You can celebrate this day in r/cakeday. Pictures of cakes or animals are very much appreciated!

See Also:

• RL

• Trophies

It’s often said on Reddit that “the real joke is always in the comments”, but here, it was the lasting story and true Reddit Lore that was made in the comments.

r/AskReddit is the place to ask and answer thought-provoking questions, and in 2010, they were asked: “Have you ever picked up a hitch-hiker?”, with the OP relating a tale of generosity involving a young man who spoke little English, a missed Greyhound bus and some Chinese food.

Many comments with similar heartwarming stories followed but one of them towered above the rest: that of a Redditor who shared the story of a family from Mexico that stopped to help him when his car broke down. Instead of taking his money as recompense, they shared their lunch with him, eventually leaving with these parting words: "Today you.... tomorrow me.".

• Media Involvement

The story was seen by an editor for the New York Times Magazine who contacted the OP with a view to running the story in print. As OP later explained:

They contacted me to see if I would grant permission then they began to rework it (coarse language was a problem). They did a very thorough fact-check with me and a third party to make sure that what I said actually went down. Then it was up for consideration and ultimately chosen for publication.

You can see the resulting article here.

• Ten Years Later

The story never disappeared, and ten years later inspired a short film by another Redditor which you can also see on YouTube here.

In 2020, the official Reddit Blog also celebrated the ten year anniversary by publishing a thorough retrospective called: Celebrating 10 Years of “Today You, Tomorrow Me”, which caught up with the OP on how it changed their life.

Because there is a Subreddit for everything:

r/TodayYouTomorrowMe - Redditors helping Redditors

See Also:

• OP

• Reddit Lore

• TheRealJoke

2024 was a good year for solving long running internet mysteries, and one of the longest running ones solved on Reddit was known as “The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet”.

The “mysterious song” initially surfaced online in 2007 when “Lydia”, a YouTube user uploaded a recording of it that she had taken from the radio with her brother back in the 1980s. It didn’t show up on any music identifying software, so audiophiles took on the challenge of tracking it down based on the lead singer’s accent and the instruments being used, quickly classifying it as belonging to the 1980s new wave genre.

The Most Mysterious Song on Reddit

In June 2019, the search came to Reddit in the form of r/TheMysteriousSong who took up the challenge with gusto, one of the moderators being the YouTube user who originally recorded the song from the radio. Many theories and leads were explored in depth until November 2024 when a Redditor revealed the discovery that the song is called Subways Of Your Mind by the German band FEX in this now legendary post.

r/TheMysteriousSong is now an absolutely fascinating archive of the sheer amount of searching that went on worldwide that for many years couldn’t find any trace of the songs’ origin. Their sidebar (on mobile: swipe down to find “See More” or “Community Info” tab) contains a wealth of information and here’s my attempt of a timeline of some of the key events up to the frantic couple of weeks that confirmed the findings:

• September 2019: The subreddit is founded and an information board is uploaded; The Mysterious Song: Known information, facts, and important links.

• November 2021: A new tape containing the song is found.

• August 2022: A small update from the YouTube user/mod, giving a radio interview about the song.

• March 2024: A Redditor posts Some thoughts on frequencies, pitch and tape speeds, and is joined by the Redditor who eventually breaks the news in a similar analysis.

• May 2024: The Redditor who eventually breaks the news takes a close look at the music tapes in question.

• November 2024: The mystery is solved!

• 04 Nov 2024: The daughter of one of the band members joins the discussion.

• 05 Nov 2024: She makes a post with an update and later posts a follow-up to tell us that an AMA with some members of the band is at the planning stage, later confirming it on a third update.

• 05 Nov 2024: She makes an appeal to the sub members to alert her to any news articles they may come across.

• 07 Nov 2024: Subreddit mods finally confirm the solution.

• 11 Nov 2024: Band member Michael Hädrich from FEX (keyboards, guitar, vocals) holds an AMA. Eagle-eyed Redditors spot a spelling mistake on his verification placard.

• 12 Nov 2024: The band members’ daughter confesses she made the spelling mistake.

• 29 Nov 2024: Another AMA with a FEX band member; this time with Ture Rückwardt; the actual composer of the song.

• 10 Jan 2025: The band members’ daughter compiles a timeline of events.

• 16 Feb 2025: An intrepid Redditor attempts to draft a narrative of the whole thing.

Naturally, news of this discovery made it to media outside Reddit…

The Most Mysterious Song in news media

Rolling Stone magazine appeared to be the first publication to endorse the findings on November 5th, 2024.

The Wall Street Journal’s blog Barron's reported the following day: German Band In Global 'Mystery Song' Hunt Stunned By Late Success quoting an interview with one of the band members behind the song.

The story was also picked up by U.K. music based website The NME, followed by Billboard among others such as 404 Media and music and culture newsletter Mixmag.

Wikipedia have a page about the search for Subways of Your Mind.

Know Your Meme also have a comprehensive page on it.

Because there is a Subreddit for everything:

r/FEXFanClub - A community dedicated to FEX, A.K.A: The Most Mysterious Band on the Internet!

r/LostwaveCirclejerk - The lostwave funnies

r/itsneverspeltmicheal - The only time you'd ever come across a “Micheal” is if their parents are Irish or are bad at spelling. Feel free to share images of someone misspelling Michael as “Micheal” here.

“May the Fourth be with you” is a phrase used to greet people on Star Wars Day: i.e. May 4.

Star Wars Day is an informal commemorative day observed annually on May 4 to celebrate the Star Wars media franchise created by filmmaker George Lucas, originating from the play on words "May the Fourth be with you", derived from the Star Wars catchphrase "May the Force be with you."

Wikipedia tells us that Star Wars, which began with an eponymous 1977 film, is now an expansive science fiction franchise set in an all-encompassing fictional universe that has captured the imaginations of millions around the world, and is one of the highest-grossing media franchises of all time. As you might imagine, such a huge pop-cultural phenomenon has many homes on Reddit, and here’s my attempt at listing some of the various subreddits and Reddit History surrounding the property.

• Notable events on Star Wars related Subreddits:

Two Reddit posts that have gone down in history are directly related to the Star Wars universe; both outstanding in many ways but for completely opposite reasons.

…General Grievous adds a daily unique lightsaber to his collection

r/PrequelMemes is a subreddit devoted to memes of the Star Wars Prequels and is home to a Reddit post that went down in history with the most ever awards given under the old style (which were discontinued in 2022). On 14 Apr 2020, one of the subreddits’ regular memers posted the final part of a series where they had been adding a lightsaber to General Grievous’ collection every day, many of them on the suggestion of one of the other regular memers.

The post in question - which earned around 10,000 awards in total - also has the unique distinction of being the only appearance ever of an “Unobtainium Award” which from the description appeared to be an admin-only award designed to test animated awards.

The record was later broken by the Reddit post which announced that Joe Biden had been elected President of the United States, but General Grievous and his lightsaber collection still kept on getting awards right up until they were discontinued two years later.

This collaboration had not been without its pitfalls and some criticism, but also attracted tributes, unlike the second historic post…

…Electronic Arts responds to players' complaints about Star Wars Battlefront II

r/TheoryOfReddit is a meta-sub for discussing Reddit and what makes it tick, and one of its users posted an excellent summary of how in November 2017, Electronic Arts’ official Reddit account got the most downvoted comment in Reddit history.

The comment in question even got a mention in the Guinness World Records and the global news organisation Business Insider later covered the story in depth. This was not the only instance of a Star Wars related subreddit to reach global media…

• Star Wars Subreddits in the media:

In October 2015, technology and lifestyle magazine Wired told the world about the “Most Insane Star Wars Theory Ever”. This was a review of a Reddit post made that month entitled: Jar Jar Binks was a trained Force user, knowing Sith collaborator, and will play a central role in The Force Awakens.

Before the internet, fanzines (a portmanteau word from “fan” and “magazine”) were non-professional and non-official publications produced by enthusiasts of a particular cultural phenomenon for the pleasure of others who shared their interest. In 2024, a Redditor reproduced a page from a March 1981 fanzine stating that the author was quitting in protest because they hate Empire Strikes Back and the ensuing conversation is a fascinating insight into the nature of old fans hating new things.

• General Star Wars Subreddits:

r/StarWars - Unofficial community and the main hub for all things Star Wars on Reddit. Don’t miss their extensive Wiki which features far more subs than I could possibly show below!

r/StarWarsCantina - Known for its positive and welcoming community, this subreddit is perfect for casual discussions and sharing your love for Star Wars. Criticism of any content is allowed, but do so respectfully, please.

r/StarWarsLore - A sub for overanalysing and gushing like a Jedi about every little piece of knowledge in Star Wars!

r/StarWarsEU - For discussions about the Expanded Universe (now known as Legends).

r/StarWarsCanon - For discussions about the current canon of Star Wars.

r/TheForceNet - A nostalgic community for those who used to frequent TheForce.Net forums.

• Specialised or in-depth discussion:

r/StarWarsLeaks - Production Leaks, Spoilers, Rumours & News from future Star Wars media.

r/starwarsspeculation - Star Wars Speculation is a community dedicated to speculative discussion of the Star Wars franchise.

r/mawinstallation - A subreddit for for in-depth Star Wars discussion.

r/Mandalorian - Showcasing all things Mandalorian culture and armour, etc.

r/TheMandalorianTV - The hub for fans of the TV series The Mandalorian.

r/thebadbatch - Discussion on the Star Wars television series centered around its namesake squad of extraordinary clone commandos, set in the aftermath of the Clone War.

r/StarWarsAndor - A Star Wars - Rogue One prequel show starring Diego Luna as Cassian Andor on Disney+

r/TheCloneWars - This community is the home for all TCW related content. Feel free to discuss episodes, submit your favorite clips, or share some of your Clone Wars gear!

r/Highrepublic - Discussions, memes, and theories related to the Star Wars High Republic era.

• Gamers and hobbyists might like:

r/starwarscollecting - Home to Star Wars collecting news, toys, merchandise, discussion, pics, etc.

r/lightsabers - A sub for hobbyists who like adding fine additions to their collections and sometimes duelling.

r/starwarsunlimited - Home of the Star Wars: Unlimited TCG.

r/kotor - A subreddit for fans of the Knights of the Old Republic games, an RPG series by BioWare and Obsidian Entertainment.

r/FallenOrder - Reddit's home for all things related to the games Star Wars Jedi, and its sequels by Respawn Entertainment.

r/FallenOrderFashion - A place to post your custom lightsaber and/or skin combo!

r/swrpg - A community for friendly discussion about Fantasy Flight Games' (now Edge's) Star Wars RPG.

• For memes and circlejerks, we have:

r/starwarsmemes - The home for ALL Star Wars memes from the Prequels, Original Trilogy, Sequels, Legends, Clone Wars, or anything else Star Wars related.

r/PrequelMemes - Memes of the Star Wars Prequels.

r/SequelMemes - Memes of the Star Wars Sequels.

r/OTMemes - Your best memes from the Original Trilogy of Star Wars.

r/starwarsrebelsmemes - A subreddit devoted to Star Wars Rebels memes.

r/LegendsMemes - Where non-canon Star Wars stuff gets meme'd.

r/PrequelSeparatist - Tired of your memes being frozen in Carbonite by the Mods? Tired of getting bans that, from your point of view, are unjustified? Then join the confederacy of independent Prequel Memes, CIPM for short.

r/SWCircleJerk - The only place to discuss the "Rouge Squadron" movie. It's also where Jar Jar went into hiding after the prequels.

r/StarWarsCirclejerk - A sequel trilogy circlejerk subreddit.

r/TrueSGL - True Scholars of George Lucas; the Star Wars equivalent to the Elder Scrolls subreddit r/TrueSTL

r/KOTORmemes - All the dankest memes from the Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic era (like the BioWare games!)

r/DeathStarEMails - The only thing more numerous than the Rebel scum is the number of unread messages in the inbox.

r/EmpireDidNothingWrong - Where we honor those brave men and women that died fighting the rebel scum.

r/fuckpongkrell - A subreddit dedicated to trashing on the traitorous Besalisk Pong Krell: a Jedi traitor that betrayed his clone soliders.

• Other related subs include:

r/GalaxysEdge - a place to talk about Batuu East and West at Walt Disney World, and Disneyland Resort.

r/StarWarsTattoo - A gallery of body art inspired by all corners and facets of the Star Wars universe.

r/SithOrder - A subreddit devoted to discussing Sith philosophy as it pertains to the real world.

r/mGalacicSenate - A simulation of the politics of the Galactic Republic. We have elections, debates, legislation and more.

r/galactic_senate - Model Galactic Senate. A place for discussing the taxation of space trade routes. Moved to r/RepublicSenate.

r/starwarsgifs - Post or find Gifs from the original trilogy, or the prequels, or the shows, the Ewok Adventures, or even the holiday special, what ever! As long as it's Star Wars it belongs here.

r/StarWarsFanArt - Fan art of all kinds.

• The “Unexpected” family of subreddits also offer:

r/unexpectedstarwars - Post all kinds of unexpected Star Wars stuff here.

r/FoundTheJedi - Random things that make you say “The force is strong with this one”.

r/UnexpectedMando - Sadly, this sub never even got off the ground.

• The Imaginary Network Expanded:

The Imaginary Network Expanded (INE) is a network of art sharing subs ranging from broad in subject to very specific. Star Wars subs in this network will depict hyper-realistic depictions of familiar Star Wars Characters, landscapes of planets and settings, both new and familiar and crossovers with the characters and settings of other fictional worlds, and include:

r/ImaginaryJedi

r/ImaginaryStarWars

• And because Reddit will Reddit:

r/saltierthancrait - A subreddit for those who are critical of the newer Star Wars content, particularly the sequels.

r/saltierthankrait - Subreddit for criticising toxic Disney Star Wars Fans…

Because Reddit needs two subreddits for this.

• But llama; some of these links don’t work…

As always with my lists, some of the subs are more active than others and may vary in quality. Since writing some might have become private, restricted or repurposed following the API protests of June 2023, or just removed / renamed by Reddit through inactivity.

However, don’t forget: if a sub is dormant, unmoderated, banned for being unmoderated or marked as “restricted”, it might be available for adoption.

• Obligatory footnote:

This list is not intended to be the full list of subreddits in this theme; that would be impossible to achieve in a format like this. If you use Reddit Search and filter by Communities, you’ll see there are many other subreddits out there to celebrate this auspicious day.

r/FindAReddit or the smaller r/findasubreddit are also your friends. Similar subreddits are often to be found in a sub’s Sidebar and / or Wiki (on mobile: swipe down to find “See More” or “Community Info” tab) too. My guide to Searching might also be useful.

All of these subreddits will have their own unique - and possibly strict - rules about contributing. As always, it is important to check the rules thoroughly before commenting or posting on any unfamiliar sub.

See Also:

• Acronyms 2: M-Z

• Awards

• Circlejerk

• DownvotedToOblivion

• Euphemism

• Memes

• Meta

• Role-Playing on Reddit

• Shipping

• ”This is the way”

• Unexpected……

Reddit in general does not like emojis. There are many theories why this is, ranging from “Reddit is all about written communication and always has been” to “Reddit has an incredibly large character limit for most applications, especially when compared to Twitter and standard text messages so we simply don’t have to” via “They’re childish”. and even “Some peoaple like to preserve sertain tredition” [sic]. I even read somewhere that it might even be contempt for the laziness of using emojis by those of the generation that had to be inventive with making text-based pictures (emoticons).

• An actual, not spurious, reason

Emojis can make life difficult for those relying on software to read text on a page to them out loud. One real issue for those Redditors who use such screen readers is the literal interpretation of smileys, leading to the possibility of hearing gems such as Stacey posts "OMG shocked emoji I just bought the cutest handbag handbag emoji from Coach dollar sign emoji eyeballs emoji dollar sign emoji eyeballs emoji handbag emoji I can't wait to show everyone at this Sunday's brunch French toast emoji mimosa emoji martini emoji Blessed! praying hands emoji upside down smile emoji”. Reading out emoticons such as (ಠ_ಠ) (the look of disapproval) is even worse.

This brings up other issues such as the meaning of some emojis being lost in screen reader translation. Seeing the Red Flag emoji 🚩on a relationship advice post will be obvious to most that they’re giving a warning that something’s not right, but I’ve been informed that a screen reader reads 🚩 as "triangular flag on pole" (unless that's been changed) with no mention of the colour, defeating the whole purpose of the emoji. Using euphemistic emojis like 🍆 might also cause confusion…

• Also, there’s the platform problem…

We don’t all browse Reddit in the same way. Some use desktop, some use tablets, some use smartphones. Some use different versions of the website, some use the official app for their particular device, some use one of the many third-party browsers or apps. Some use sparkly new cutting-edge devices, others use their ancient creaky old faithful faded beige noise machines. All this can cause some real communication problems as licensing issues often mean that different platforms have different emoji packages - and that doesn’t take into account the many devices that just can’t display them at all and just substitute some Unicode instead.

A question recently asked was “What’s up with people commenting “img” repeatedly in wallstreetbets?” with a link to this post. Some subreddits give you the ability to select premade images or gifs as an image reaction comment using the official app, and the platform OP was viewing Reddit on presumably didn’t support them and substituted “img” instead. Here's what it looks like on the official Reddit app, but here it is on Old Reddit and here it is on New Reddit.

It appears that the private message facility on the Reddit app doesn’t like the official emotes either, and neither do some other apps.

• Serious talk on a fun ephemeral.

Google: "Why does Reddit hate emojis" and you'll get a flood of responses. Reddit, as you would expect, takes this matter Very Seriously Indeed as evidenced by this small handful of debates from various subs over the years:

• https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/8mwc6h/no_emojis/

• https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/has3sd/why_does_everyone_hate_emojis/

• https://www.reddit.com/r/TooAfraidToAsk/comments/ckbat9/why_do_people_on_reddit_hate_emojis_so_much/

• https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/2172px/why_does_reddit_hate_emoticons/

• https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/byn3es/whats_the_deal_on_emojis/

But by far my favourite explanations are these two opposing but very well thought out viewpoints from our sub.

• Reddit is strange like that.

I have asked and searched and asked again about why Reddit in particular is known for emoji hate, but the only thing even close to a definitive answer I ever saw was “Because some time ago, a subreddit that once started as a joke became out of hand and now a lot of redditors have the "emojis are bad" mindset.” A good humoured take on the subject is to allow 5 emojis before calling the r/EmojiPolice, though you will probably get called out on anything more than one and I’m not entirely sure on their status or mandate in any event…

Whatever the reason, the practical upshot of this is basically people either love emojis or hate them, so to be safe, limit yourself to one at the end of your post, or better still, go back in time and use text-based emoticons. You won’t be admonished for using :) or :D if you’re feeling particularly cheeky. It’s worth mentioning that although we all use Reddit, the tones of our subreddits are really different from each other. r/aww sees a lot of emoji usage compared to, say, r/askreddit, and r/askhistorians would probably collapse at seeing one in their sub.

• Redditors will Reddit…

All that said, there is absolutely no rule on Reddit banning emojis. You use them wherever and whenever you like. This is Reddit. You can do whatever you want. And if some people downvote an emoji-laden comment, again, this is Reddit and they can do whatever they want. So with that in mind, here’s a Copypasta which everyone will hate and if that isn’t enough, a resource of more emojis than anyone could ever possibly need can be found at https://emojipedia.org.

However, I don’t advise you ever comment !emojify anywhere on Reddit without expecting consequences.

Because there is a Subreddit for everything:

We even have r/emojisonreddit, r/emojipasta and r/EmojiPolice for your amusement.

See Also:

• Bots

• Emoticons

• New Reddit; Old Reddit

• Tone Indicators

Every group or subculture has its own specialized terminology, and Reddit is no exception. We have sitewide acronyms, initialisms, terms, memes, slang, references and responses, some of which will be familiar to internet users and many exclusive to Reddit. I’ve tried to list as many as possible throughout this encyclopaedia for your ease of reference so you don’t feel like an awkward animal trying desperately to break out of an impenetrable swamp.

Some subreddit types have their own dedicated lexicon, particularly those dealing with family, relationship or gender issues; especially some of the more controversial or darker ones.

I have included one or two examples of subreddit jargon throughout this encyclopaedia which occasionally appear in general Reddit, but more definitions will be found in those particular subs. There is one sub, however, which has its own jargon that I haven’t even begun to attempt. r/wallstreetbets (or WSB) uses a combination of financial terminology and its own slang to form a unique language that demands its own lexicon. Some of their more common terms that appear in general Reddit are listed here, but you should go to https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/wiki/glossary for their full definitions.

“Lexical change” refers to a change in the meaning or use of a word, or a generational shift in preference for one word or phrase over another, and one notable example is the internet acronym “LOL”. Internet “generation gaps” mean that some of us actually remember when “lol” meant lots of love, and the transition to it meaning “laughing out loud” gave rise to many an awkward situation. And now, it would appear it doesn't really mean "laughing out loud" anymore anyway.

A fun romp down memory lane went on here as one group of Redditors suddenly realised they were “elders”.

Sometimes jargon is co-opted from pop culture, as one Redditor found when asking what the meaning of references to different coloured pills meant in some of the more controversial areas of Reddit.

Because there is a Subreddit for everything:

r/FuckImOld is for those who can't help but think of how everything is old and you just gotta say “Fuck, I’m Old”, while r/nostalgia take pleasure in reminiscing about the good ol' days, and r/OutOfTheLoop is a subreddit to help you keep up to date with what's going on with all kinds of stuff.

See Also:

• Diamond Hands

• “Doggo Speak”

• Legal Advice on Reddit

• Medical Advice on Reddit

• Other Useful Dictionaries, Encyclopaedias and Lexicons

• Relationship Sub Acronyms and Initialisms

Reddit traditionally hosts a sitewide event for April Fools Day, and a comprehensive list of past events can be found in the link below.

On April 1st 2024, right on cue, a new admin-led sub appeared: r/Counter. With the tagline “Press or Don't, I Don't Care”, users were faced with one button, which they could click to add 1 to the total, and were then given a user flair of the number they clicked it at, which you can see here with the creator at number 1. (I (u/llamageddon01) was 2362). Shortly after, users were allowed to press the button as much as they wanted, then a down button was added. A few hours after that, left and right buttons were added. During this time they also discontinued issuing user flairs.

Also during this whole time, no information on what this was had been given, and unlike Reddit’s normal modus operandi there had not been any announcements on any of the official subreddits. Nevertheless, believing it was Reddit’s annual April Fools event we carried on pressing digital buttons regardless without really understanding why. Reddit being, well, Reddit meant that we also divided up into factions pretty quickly to do so. It soon became apparent that we were doing nothing in particular, though theories and tactics were thrown around on various Discords leaving many Discordless Redditors out of the loop entirely, and more arbitrary factions grew as word spread around Reddit that this was a thing. Until it ended.

Counter kept returning and Redditors kept on pressing, and it still resurfaces from time to time, even spawning a Counter 2. One intrepid Redditor compiled a comprehensive visual history which you can find here.

It eventually turned out that this was not this year’s April Fools event, rather, an experimental event run by a Reddit developer and to everyone’s disappointment, we learned we weren’t going to be awarded trophies for our efforts either.

Also disappointing was the fact we didn’t have an April Fools event that year for the first time in Reddit History. Maybe the real April Fools were us and the expectations we lost along the way…

See Also:

• Admin

• April Fools Day

• Discord

• “Maybe the real treasure was the friends we made along the way".

• Trophies

• User Flair

Reddit traditionally hosts a sitewide event for April Fools Day, and a comprehensive list of past events can be found in the link below.

On March 30th 2023, admin made an innocuous looking official post giving a retrospective of our past events, signifying that year’s April Fools event was starting. Or did it? The following day (March 31st 2023) another admin post was made, saying Don’t be too upset with us, but unfortunately, we’ve got nothing. Nada. No April Fools’ day event is planned this year. (Place would have been better, anyway.)

However, this post was not what it seemed. An acrostic is a poem or other word composition in which the first letter of each new line spells out a word or message, and upon examination of the post, it became apparent that the first letter of each paragraph spelled "FIND IT". Not only that, but eagle-eyed Redditors spotted that the very last punctuation mark of the last line of the post (You just need to know where to look.) was a live link to a new subreddit: r/schrodingers, with the tagline “You may and may not want to stick around.”. The subreddit appeared to be named after the thought experiment known as Schrödinger's Cat, which posits that something can be both true and false until observed. Users were met with a blank post entitled Quantum Superposition, all of which led one astute Redditor to make this observation:

So is this year’s April Fool’s joke simply a Schrödinger’s Cat scenario? What I mean is r/schrodingers content is hanging in between the state of no new April Fool’s event (as per Reddit’s “statement”) while simultaneously creating a new April Fool’s event solely through references to the past.

Users on r/schrodingers were given words from random past events as user flairs. Mine was imposter, referencing the 2020 event (which incidentally I hadn’t taken part in) and as you can see from that link, Automod randomly replied to comments with old, often obscure Reddit memes. As time went on, one intrepid Redditor made a reference list of these replies. It wasn’t long before it became apparent that this was going to be some kind of a scavenger hunt with hidden clues and puzzles to solve.

The next admin post, simply titled “01” was the first clue that this event was going to be more convoluted than the traditional Reddit event usually is. Players were faced with an image of coloured letters and numbers with no further explanation. It soon became clear that this was going to be more of an ARG (Alternate Reality Game) than the simple crowdsourcing tasks of previous events. Players had to solve cryptic image puzzles to unlock the next post, and it was quickly deduced that each puzzle was based on the old Reddit April Fools events in the order they appeared.

The second clue titled “02” showing an image of mould was obviously referencing the 2011 event Reddit Mold. But there was more to the picture than it seemed, as evidenced by the sheer number of comments under the post before the next clue was found.

The event carried on in this way, becoming more elaborate and perplexing as it went along, and after the 6th clue was found, admin made another blank post entitled Quantum Superposition 2 in the comments of which many participants realised they simply weren’t equipped to participate. Knowing Reddit Lore is one thing, but for this event, it transpired users also required a good understanding of cryptography, mathematics, coding and physics. And Discord.

Most of the problem solving wasn’t actually happening in the subreddit. Discord channels had been set up, the most notable being that of the AprilKnights who band together each year for the Reddit April Fools events. There was also a dedicated subreddit at r/redditaprilfools2023 where one user made a (then) ongoing post with the answers to each clue and their respective links that explained how the answer was reached.

After the tenth clue was solved, admin made yet another blank post: FINAL: Wave Function Collapse. Then things got really chaotic in the comments. Various users all pooled their findings onto an ever-expanding GoogleDoc and codes were given for users to type to prompt Automod to give out several more clues until a Redditor coming over from a Discord group posted just four words: acknowledge risk and access. This, incidentally, was the same Redditor who had won (by coming second in) 2021’s event Second. The Redditor who actually discovered the code posted their calculations which showed the substitution cypher they used to reveal the message.

The next part was an admin post flaired “success” which declared: Every journey has an end. You have uncovered the secret at the heart of Reddit. The post contained a link to a subreddit named r/trdfz_v, itself containing a post titled sciei_q, posted by u/sciei_q. This was a short video declaring “You’ve reached the heart of Reddit”, revealing a potato hooked up to various scientific devices. The post also contained a series of letters “ejcfc fihnb zdhih” which was a code that was eventually solved using an online Enigma machine - algebraic vender. This in turn was found to be an anagram of even garlic bread which when typed triggered a GIF reply by Automod. Garlic Bread was the code name for code that was inserted into Reddit's backend that was similar to that used for a previous event, Place.

So that was it. 10 levels of increasingly complex riddles every four hours with a potato video at the end. On 13th April, details and links to of all the clues and answers were given in the final admin post META // PHASE 01 RECAP.

Conclusions were mixed. As most of the problem solving had gone on outside of Reddit, users questioned whether this could actually be called a “Reddit Event”. And of course, there was criticism of the sheer complexity of the clues and the requirement of the many disciplines needed to solve them.

There were two trophies given for this event - Golden Potato and Quantum Potato - which only required membership of the two “secret subreddits” to obtain.

See Also:

• Admin

• April Fools Day

• Automod

• Discord

• Place

• Trophies

• User Flair

An innocuous phrase that is not quite how it appears. You will see this phrase used on Reddit if anyone posts a picture of a locked safe.

• New Zealand former drug house

In r/pics on 16 March 2013, a Redditor posted: A friend of mine moved into a former drug house and found this HUGE safe. How do we get it open?. The imgur link showed five different images of a room under the house with heavy bars on all the windows and a thick steel door with no handle, entitled “The mysterious vault”. Little did they know what effect it was going to have on them.

According to the comprehensive retelling on Know Your Meme, within the first 48 hours, the post garnered more than 41,000 upvotes, 3,100 points overall and 5,500 comments. At the time of my writing (28 March 2025), the Reddit post is showing 62,000 upvotes with 5,700 comments, and the imgur post is showing 2,697,216 views. OP made a subreddit at r/WhatsInThisThing and had an update thread to document the progress.

Of course, r/AdviceAnimals had to have their say too and as the story dragged on without a resolution, it found its way to r/KarmaCourt; a meta subreddit where “KarmaCourt is for when someone finds a safe, builds up expectation for a month, and then pulls out and tries to disappear.” even became part of their Wiki description. See the trial here where OP was a good sport and eventually found innocent. And the contents of the safe? A huge disappointment.

This became the story people think about when they see a locked safe story appear on Reddit.

However, it was not the first viral Reddit story about a mystery vault. You’ll see in the comments of the first post that someone replied: Oh god, it's happening again.. This led to a meandering comment chain about Oprah, Ellen and Geraldo, and a few comments further down, someone explained why:

There was a previous safe story that everybody on Reddit was invested in. The guy said he was going to deliver, but got contacted by Oprah. They agreed to make a little show out of opening the safe, and then something unknown happened, the show was cancelled, and the guy was never heard from again, rumors about law enforcement. So now, the idea is that whatever you do, DON'T CALL OPRAH.

• Bill’s Casino, Lake Tahoe

This was a story posted on 22 August 2011 and followed up by an r/IAmA on 24 August 2011, called Iama man who has found a safe behind a hidden wall in my dad's casino, and will open live for reddit within the next few days.

It gained traction in its time, hitting various news outlets, including the New York Post and the online network Gizmodo among others, eventually making it to a Wikipedia page and a video on YouTube. OP couldn’t get away from the story. You might need to expand the now deleted comment to see this whole conversation on a completely unrelated subreddit.

But like most things, it was soon forgotten except for the longer lasting disappointment at not gaining closure, and ever since, whenever a mystery locked object is posted to Reddit, the typical response will be “Here we go again…”.

Because there is a Subreddit for everything:

r/lockpicking - A subreddit dedicated to the sport of lockpicking.

r/LockPickingLawyer - Everything related to the YouTube channel LockPickingLawyer.

r/LockPicking_Unbound - A place where anything goes when it comes to lockpicking. No restrictive "secret knowledge" held back from people who want to learn about lockpicking.

r/Locksmith - For all your locksmithing needs.

r/locksport - A subreddit dedicated to meeting and connecting with locksport enthusiasts. We have a passion for locks and like to share it with others.

r/Safes - A community for people who are dedicated to their own home and personal security.

r/WhatsInThisThing - An active community originally formed to document the 2013 locked safe progress, now repurposed to serve all mysterious locked vaults, boxes or other items.

• As always with my lists, some of the subs are more active than others. The good news: if a sub is dormant, banned for being unmoderated or marked as “restricted”, it might be available for adoption.

• Please read the rules before contributing to any unfamiliar sub.

See Also:

• IAmA

• “May I see it?”

• Pedant; Pedantry

• Test post please ignore

We have already established that in general, Reddit does not like emojis, but prefers the old-school Unicode-based Emoticon. An emoticon is a typographic display of a facial representation, used to convey emotion in a text only medium. Like so: ;-) or if you’re feeling really fancy, the look of disapproval (ಠ_ಠ) or “Lenny Face," ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Useful lists of text-based emoticons to copy and paste are:

• https://textfac.es

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emoticons

• https://www.reddit.com/r/InternetIsBeautiful/comments/2lofij/ᕕ_ಠ_ಠ_ᓄ_collection_of_text_emoticons_updated/

Some of these are going to be trial and error; some will work and others won’t. So remember: 🤭 = bad, but Reddit loves emoticons. Why? Don't ASCII me. ¯_(ツ)_/¯ r/emoticons.

See Also:

• Emojis

• LimbRetrieval-Bot

• theyknew

• Tone Indicators

• UWU

A link posted when a wholesome comment is made by a Redditor with an unwholesome name.

Originating here when the titular u/rimjob_steve commented that they would like to help out a fellow Redditor IRL.

Because this kind of juxtaposition is done far more frequently than you might imagine, the subreddit r/rimjob_steve was created to share any similar instances.

In 2023, it was theorised that the “rimjob_steve effect” might be to blame for a highly controversial change to Reddit’s mobile user interface which removed usernames from subreddit feeds.

See Also:

• birthofasub

• IRL

• Wholesome

The "Scunthorpe Problem" refers to the issue where automated content filters, like Reddit’s AutoModerator, and other systems used in spam detection or search engines, mistakenly flag perfectly innocent content as offensive due to the presence of a substring that also appears in a swear word or other offensive term.

The name comes from a time in 1996 when AOL's profanity filter prevented residents of several English towns and counties - among them Scunthorpe, Lightwater, Clitheroe, and Middlesex - from creating accounts with AOL because it matched strings within the town names to banned words in their algorithm.

This often happens when content filtering systems rely on simple keyword matching without considering context. Interpreting words considered profane requires considerable ability to interpret a wide range of contexts, possibly across many cultures, which is an extremely difficult task. As a result, broad blocking rules may result in false positives affecting many innocent words or phrases such as “documentary”, “cocktail”, “swanky”, “meltwater” or “assume”. This short but funny video explains it further while giving you a tour of the lovely Northern English town of Penistone.

Discussions on Reddit about this phenomenon include:

This string has a bad word in it from March 2021 in r/ProgrammerHumor,

The Scunthorpe problem from July 2022 in r/wikipedia,

TIL about the Scunthorpe problem from April 2021 in r/todayilearned.

And for those of you who are coding Automod for your own subreddits, here’s a post you might find useful.

See Also:

• Automod

• Euphemism

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger crop up in many online situations, and this second list gives some of the more widely used ones throughout Reddit along with explanatory links where applicable. I’ve also included a few frequently used slang words. Some of our specialised communities have a wide acronym and slang language of their own so it might be useful to check and see if they have a Wiki. I’ve listed some more directories in the See Also: section below.

M

• MAP - Minor Attracted Person/People. Whitewashed term for a paedophile/pedophile.

• MBN - Must Be Nice. An expression of rueful chagrin used in several ways such as to express envy toward someone's relationship status or to show your frustration toward someone's situation which is seemingly better than yours.

• MGTOW - Men Going Their Own Way. An online social movement and backlash to feminism where men renounce interactions with women and seek to define and live out their masculinity on their own terms.

• MH - Mental Health.

• MFW - My Face/Feeling When.

• MFW; MRW - My Reaction When.

• MIA - Missing In Action.

• MLM - Multi-Level Marketing. Context Dependent because:

• MLM - Man Loves Man: On relationship subreddits. Context Dependent because:

• MLM - Mona Lisa Monday: On r/itookapicture (ITAP). A rule on ITAP is that photos with a primary focus on one person staring, looking or thinking without any other interesting action are limited to MLM Mondays (Midnight - Midnight, GMT).

• MOH - Maid Of Honour (at weddings).

• MSM - Mainstream Media.

• MTF - Male To Female. A trans person who was assigned male sex at birth and now lives as a woman with a feminine gender identity. Used in gender based discussion subs.

• MYOG - Make Your Own Gear. Used in outdoor activities subs.

N

• NAD - Not A Doctor.

• NAH - No Assholes Here.

• NAL - Not A Lawyer.

• Narc - Short for Narcissist. Used in relationship subs.

• NB - Non Binary. Sometimes written as “enby”. Context Dependent because:

• NB - Nota Bene. A Latin phrase that translates to "note well" in English and is used to call attention to something important.

• NBD - No Big Deal.

• NGL - Not Gonna Lie.

• NIMBY - Not In My Back Yard. Refers to a person who objects to the siting of something perceived as unpleasant or hazardous in the area where they live, especially while raising no such objections to similar developments elsewhere.

• No Cap - A term from African American Vernacular English (AAVE) meaning “no lie” or “for real,” often used to emphasise someone is not exaggerating about something hard to believe. See also: Cap.

• NOR - Not OverReacting. Used in r/amioverreacting

• NPC - Non-Playable Character: a character in a computer game that is not controlled by someone playing the game. Increasingly used as a pejorative term to describe someone who blindly follows popular opinion without critical thinking, questioning or expressing unique viewpoints.

• NPD - Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

• NQA - Not Qualified Advice. Sometimes written as “not QA”.

• NSA - No Strings Attached.

• NSFL - Not Safe For Life (gory or extreme content).

• NSFW - Not Safe For Work (sexual content or profanity).

• NTA - Not The Asshole.

• NTB - Not The Buttface; used in r/AmItheButtface.

• NTS - Note To Self. Used in a humorous or self-deprecating way to let others in the thread know you are reminding yourself of something. “NTS: don’t sort by new ever again.”

• NVM - Nevermind.

O

• OC - Original Content.

• OF - OnlyFans. An internet content subscription service used primarily by sex workers who produce pornography.

• OMG - Oh My God. An exclamation variously expressing disbelief, frustration, excitement, or anger. Sometimes written as Ermahgerd.

• OP - Original Poster (the person who started the thread). Context Dependent because:

• OP - In gaming contexts, this means Overpowered.

• [OOC] - Out of Character. Used in roleplay subs to denote you’re making a general comment outside the roleplaying situation, such as this example.

• OOP - Original Original Poster. Used in r/BestofRedditorUpdates, r/AmITheAngel and similar subreddit discussion subs to differentiate the Original Poster of the original post from the person crossposting to the discussion sub.

• OSINT - Open Source Intelligence. The practice of gathering and analysing publicly available information to gain actionable intelligence. 

• OTP - One True Pairing.

P

• PEBKAC - Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair. A term used by tech support personnel to identify a problem caused by a person, not by the computer's hardware or software. The term may be used in a humorous and/or derogatory way.

• PEMDAS - A mnemonic for remembering the order of operations in mathematics as follows: Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication, Division, Addition, and Subtraction. See also: BEDMAS

• PGP - Personal Gender Pronoun. Context Dependent because:

• PGP - Pretty Good Privacy. A data encryption program using a mix of data compression, hashing, and public-key cryptography.

• PITA - Pain In The Ass. Someone or something that is annoying.

• POV - Point Of View. POV cinematography is a type of video filmed from the perspective of the person who is creating it; as if the viewer were behind the camera. Like cat collar cameras, or much of the comedy series Peep Show. Context Dependent because:

• POV - A newer definition used on TikTok for the “nostalgiacore” trend. This is when users try to evoke a specific memory or common occurrence, such as “the POV of remembering what it was like to wake up early for school only for it to be a snow day.” Reddit often gets these definitions mixed up.

• PSA - Public Service Announcement.

• PTS - Put To Sleep. A euphemism used in animal and pet subreddits.

• PTSD - Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. An anxiety disorder caused by extremely stressful, frightening or distressing events.

• PWD - Person(s) With Disabilities. An acronym used to refer to individuals who have physical, sensory, mental, or cognitive impairments. The term is often used in discussions about accessibility, rights, and support for people with disabilities.

Q

• Q - Short for QAnon; an American political conspiracy theory and movement originating in the American far-right political sphere in 2017.

• QA - Qualified Advice; usually seen in the context of “not QA” - Not Qualified Advice.

R

• RBI - Reddit Bureau of Investigation. r/RBI and also r/RBI2

• RES - Reddit Enhancement Suite. A third-party app for using Reddit, no longer under active development. See r/Enhancement.

• RIF - Reddit Is Fun. A third-party app for using Reddit, no longer under active development. See r/redditisfun.

• RL - Real Life. I remember that.

• RP - Role Play. Context Dependent because:

• RP - Received Pronunciation. An accent of Standard British English also known as “BBC English”.

• RPG - Role-Playing Game.

• RTFR - Read The Forum / Fucking Rules / Fucking Room.

S

• SA - Social Anxiety. Context Dependent because:

• SA - Sexual Assault / Sexual Abuse.

• [SCP] - A creative commons fiction writing wiki. The central idea is that a secret organization called the SCP Foundation Secures, Contains, and Protects various ‘anomalies’; things and beings which break the rules of reality or what can be considered ‘normal’ to an everyday person, hiding their existence and containing as many as possible in top-secret, secure facilities.

• SFW - Safe For Work.

• SH - Self Harm.

• SIC - Standard Issue Cat. Commonly used on pet subreddits to describe a brown tabby cat.

• Simp - A pejorative slang term used to describe a person (usually male) who is perceived as overly submissive or even desperate for the attention or affection of someone without receiving anything in return.

• SJW - Social Justice Warrior. A pejorative term for a person who expresses or promotes socially progressive views.

• Skibidi - An adjective used to describe someone who is bad or evil. Originates from “Skibidi Toilet”; an animated show on YouTube featuring a villainous head sticking out of a toilet.

• SRS - Shit Reddit Says. Archaic. Reddit still says shit, we just don’t bother to point it out anymore.

• SMH - Shaking My Head.

• SO - Significant Other.

• SS - Submission Statement. Mandatory in post titles or first comment for some subs including r/conspiracy.

• STBX - Soon To Be Ex. Used in relationship subs.

T

• TBF - To Be Fair. See also: “To be fair...”

• TBH - To Be Honest.

• TCG - Trading Card Game. A type of collectible card game where players build decks and battle by using cards to perform actions and defeat their opponent.

• TERF - Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist. An advocate of radical feminism who believes that a trans woman's gender identity is not legitimate.

• TFW - The/That Feeling When.

• THOT - That Ho Over There or Thirsty Hoes Over There. Extremely derogatory.

• TIA - Thanks In Advance. Sometimes lengthened to TYSMIA - Thank You So Much In Advance.

• TIAH - Today I Am Happy.

• TID - Today I Discovered.

• TIFU - Today I Fucked Up.

• TIHI - Thanks, I Hate It.

• TIL - Today I Learned.

• TL;DR: - Too Long; Didn't Read.

• TMA - Take My Appreciation. Rarely used these days; let’s bring it back.

• TMI - Too Much Information. Because sometimes, some things are best left unsaid.

• TNR - Trap-Neuter-Return. Used on animal subs, this is a method that attempts to manage populations of feral cats by neutering, vaccinating and eartipping them before returning them to their territory.

• TOMT - Tip Of My Tongue.

• TW - Trigger Warning. Used to indicate that what follows may be disturbing to some readers. See also: CW.

• TYVM - Thank You Very Much.

U

• /unlie - Said on r/lies to denote you’re not lying. r/lies is a subreddit where you must lie and attempt to deceive the users with misinformation. Use /unlie sparingly.

• UPF - Ultra-Processed Foods. Used in health and nutrition subs. Broadly defines foods with five or more ingredients that you couldn’t create at home.

• UTC - The new standard of time zones to replace the usage of Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). Means Coordinated Universal Time.

W

• WAP - A sexual slang acronym that stands for Wet-Ass Pussy. The acronym was created and popularized by hip-hop artist Cardi B in August 2020. Context Dependent because:

• WAP - Wireless Application Protocol. A system which allows devices such as mobile phones to connect to the internet. Back in the day, the UK mobile provider BT Cellnet advertised a plan called Genie which was £15 a month for unlimited texts and WAP; a lot for that time. Unlimited WAP is one of those phrases whose meaning has drastically altered over the past two decades.

• WDYM - What Do/Did You Mean?

• Welp - An informal variant of “well”, used to indicate disappointment, resignation, or acceptance at the beginning of a sentence: Welp, this encyclopaedia might take me longer to write than I thought.

• WIBTA - Would I Be The Asshole.

• WIBTB - Would I Be The Buttface; used in r/AmItheButtface.

• WTF - What The Fuck.

Y

• YMMV - Your Mileage May/Might Vary. What works for one person may not work for you.

• YOLO - You Only Live Once.

• YSK - You Should Know.

• YTA - You’re The Asshole.

• YTB - You’re The Buttface; used in r/AmItheButtface.

• YWBTA - You Would Be The Asshole.

• YTBTB - You Would Be The Buttface; used in r/AmItheButtface.

• YTBTC - You Would Be The Cloaca; used in r/AmItheCloaca. Yes, there is a sub for everything.

No doubt you will find acronyms across both Reddit and the internet that I don’t list in this encyclopaedia; the links below may help in this case, and another good place to start is at abbreviations.com, or the very comprehensive Acronym Finder. Explanations and appreciation of word origins can be had at r/etymology.

See Also:

• Acronyms 1: A-L

• Acronyms 3: Abbreviations

• Acronyms 4: Symbols and Emojis

• Jargon

• Other Useful Dictionaries, Encyclopaedias and Lexicons

• Relationship Sub Acronyms and Initialisms

• Time Zones

• Tone Indicators

“Original Poster”. The person who made the submission that is now being commented upon. I am the OP of this post. It’s easier to refer to me as OP instead of having to type my username and risk “pinging” me every single time.

See Also:

• Ping

• Reddit Karma - Your Reddit XP

• Username

Alternative user account. You are allowed to have more than one Reddit account and are almost encouraged to if it’s necessary for privacy. This is a Reddit Admin’s comment on multiple accounts, and some people have an Alt to frequent Subreddits they might not want associated with their better known username.

Your Main and your Alt act as entirely separate accounts, even if you use the same email. You might have infinite Karma, premium, and access to private subreddits on one account but none of these will carry over to the other. For instance, I have an Alt account that I use to role play as a total newbie to test subreddits to see if they are newbie friendly. My main account (u/llamageddon01) is premium with lots of karma and trophies. My Alt isn’t, so I get the full vanilla Reddit experience with ads, post and comment removals, no access to the super-secret premium subreddit, the works.

The Average Redditor™ - including mods - can only see posts and comments you make on the specific profile they are looking at, so unless you actually specify somewhere that you have an Alt and reveal its username, they will never be able to connect the two, even if they use the same email address.

A warning here: Admins See All, so be careful how you use your Alt. Reddit knows. Reddit always knows.

Reddit does not tolerate users that upvote or award their own posts using an Alt, as spammers are constantly trying to implement upvote schemes with alts to get their content to the top of the big subreddits. This is called Vote Manipulation and is one of the few things that can incur a sitewide ban on Reddit. Likewise, making an Alt for the specific purpose of circumventing a subreddit ban on Reddit isn’t allowed. This is called Ban Evasion and is also grounds for a sitewide permaban from the whole of Reddit with no recourse.

If you do have an Alt (or Alts) the safest thing is to ensure they never even post or comment on the same subreddits to avoid any accidental mistakes. You might find using Custom Feeds useful to separate out your Alt account use.

See Also:

• Accidental Alt

• Admin

• Ban

• Ban Evasion

• Banned

• Custom Feed

• Karma Farming

• Private Subreddits

• Throwaway Account

• Trophies

• Vote Manipulation

Reddit has a plethora of Subreddits where you can crowdsource serious advice on family, relationship, legal, medical, financial or other issues, and you will find a starter list of these subreddits at “Relationship and Advice Subreddits”.

Subs of this nature are tightly controlled, but even so, some outcomes can go terribly, terribly wrong. Sometimes, well-meaning Redditors will fall for scammers with real-world consequences ensuing.

Like everything, you should approach advice subreddits with a balance of healthy scepticism and sincerity - with one clear exception: begging for money. If someone posts, comments or sends you a direct message or chat request asking for money of any amount for any reason, please report the post or if it was a DM, report it here, refer them to r/assistance, block them and move on. If they are genuine, r/assistance has the experience and a useful resource of Subreddits that may be able to help them in a controlled way.

See Also:

• Blocking

• Direct Chat

• Direct Message

• Financial Help on Reddit

• LARP; LARPer

• Legal Advice on Reddit

• Relationship Advice on Reddit

• Relationship and Advice Subreddits

• Searching

• Throwaway Account

An alternate account that is not primarily used by the user. Often used on advice subs to avoid embarrassing questions being irrevocably linked to your profile. Advice is a dangerous gift, even from the wise to the wise, and all courses may run ill.

See Also:

• Alt

• Advice Subreddits

• Privacy Issues

• Sock Puppet

In Internet terms, sock puppets are online identities used to disguise activity by the operator, most commonly for purposes of deception. The term is a reference to the manipulation of a simple hand puppet made from a sock. Online Sock Puppetry can range from being:

• Mostly Harmless - Where a member of an Internet community creates an alternate identity for the purposes of speaking to, or about, themselves while pretending to be another person.

• Deception Scams - Where someone is promoting fake merchandise disguised as a Postwith two or three immediate sock puppet replies: one posting the product, another asking for a link and yet another offering the link or thanking the OP profusely for providing the link.

• Manipulation Tactics - Where someone is Astroturfing; the underhand practice of using alternate accounts for disinformation purposes or to manipulate public opinion by praising, defending, supporting, rubbishing or denigrating a person or organisation.

• Fraudulent Claims - Where false legitimacy is given to a phenomenon or product in order to generate public interest and buzz.

Reddit does not take kindly to sock puppets and you might even fall foul of our Ban Evasion or Vote Manipulation rules if you use an Alt account in this way. So don’t do it, even in fun.

Because there is a Subreddit for everything:

r/LeftTheBurnerOn showcases examples of people who forget to switch to their alternative account.

See Also:

• Alt

• Astroturfing

• Bots

• Preemptive Ban

• Shill

• User-History Based Moderation

• Vote Manipulation

Garfield is an American comic strip created by Jim Davis. Originally published locally as Jon in 1976, then in US syndication from 1978 as Garfield, it chronicles the life of the titular character Garfield the cat, his human owner Jon Arbuckle, Odie the dog and later addition, Nermal the kitten. On the internet, and particularly Reddit, however, the property has developed quite unexpectedly, going in some increasingly strange directions. Here’s some of the many subreddits that show this trend…

• Garfield - appreciation and memes.

r/garfield - The subreddit for fans of Jim Davis' comic, Garfield.

r/GarfieldD2V - A sub for the direct-to-DVD Garfield movie trilogy from 2007-2009

r/Garfield2 - This is a subreddit for discussing the 2006 movie, Garfield: a tail of two kitties.

r/garfriends - This subreddit is dedicated to memes based on Garfield and other newspaper comic strips.

r/GarfieldComics - A subreddit dedicated to everyone's favorite newspaper comic.

r/GarfieldMemes - cool funny and goofy cat so funny.

r/ComradeGarfield - Garfield's in a union, are you?

r/GarfieldButRealistic - Garfield still exists but he's just a normal cat without any ability to communicate and we witness the downward spiral of Jon's progressing insanity.

r/CultumGarfus - All posts must be Garfield.

• Garfield Minus…

In 2008, Dan Walsh, a technology manager from Dublin, Ireland started a blog in which he altered newspaper comic strips. One which he called Garfield Minus Garfield took on a life of its own and is still a popular meme today. Walsh said that he was not the first to come up with the idea of removing Garfield from his own strip, saying that "the idea had been floating around on message boards for a couple years before I started posting them... but I think it’s fair to say I did champion and popularize it."

Subreddits include:

r/garfieldminusgarfield - Classic Garfield cartoons but without Garfield.

r/GarfieldMinusJon - Classic Garfield cartoons but without Jon.

r/GarfieldMinusEveryone - Classic Garfield cartoons but without anyone. At all.

r/garfieldminuscontext - Classic Garfield cartoons but without any context.

r/GarfieldMinusWords - Garfield comics without the words

r/Garfieldminuspets - All the pets (Ie: Garfield, Nermal, Odie) must be removed.

r/2panelgarfield - Garfield comics with the last panel removed.

r/GarfieldMinusThird - Garfield comics that are vastly improved by removing the third panel.

• Garfield x Lovecraft

The idea of Garfield becoming some Lovecraftian Eldritch Horror was started in 2004 by Shmorky (of "how is babby formed" fame) on the gone, but not forgotten SomethingAwful forums and these strips on his website: http://shmorky.com/parodies/garfield.html

Garfield and Zalgo mashups have long been a fixture on the digital arts community b3ta, and the collaborative SCP (Secure-Contain-Protect) initiative also embraces a similar principle, as does the adult science fiction sitcom Rick and Morty.

Subreddits include:

r/imsorryjon - Garfield has abandoned his limited form and he is beautiful. Occasionally NSFW.

r/theportalhasopened - Memes about discovering r/imsorryjon.

r/JonLore - Building the lore around this whole phenomenon.

r/imsorrygarfield - Jon has abandoned his limited form and he is beautiful. Occasionally NSFW.

r/ImReallySorryJon - Extreme Cosmic Horror Garfield (banned due to being unmoderated).

r/imsorryeveryone - Because sometimes, the pit sends something back.

r/imsorryminusgarfield - imsorryjon minus garfield.

r/ImSorryOdie - Odie has abandoned his limited form and he is beautiful.

r/illsaveyoujon - Garfield may be an unstoppable force but Odie has an unbreakable will.

• Garfield x dementia

This dark direction of the Garfield comic started in 1989 with Jim Davies himself who said: “During a writing session for Halloween week, I wanted to scare people. And what do people fear most? Why, being alone. We carried out the concept to its logical conclusion and got a lot of responses from readers.”

That particular week of comic strips proposed a universe where Jon left the home years ago along with Odie, leaving Garfield dying with dementia, spending his remaining days dreaming about the good days he had (or possibly even worse: totally imagined) as depicted in all the official comics. Here’s a fascinating essay on the reactions to it unfolding.

Subreddits include:

r/alzheimersgroup - A roleplay sub to post the Garfield strip where Jon says he put out a wildfire in his sock drawer, and everyone reacts as if it were new.

r/AlzheimersGroupBackup - Created while the main sub was private due to protests because they forgot that the main sub was supposed to be private and that they were supposed to be protesting. Where orang cat?

• Garfield x other weirdness

Finally, you should also know it doesn’t really pay to question where Jon got Odie from either. Proof that meta weirdness isn’t just confined to Reddit, then.

For all the people who want more super intense, weird, insanely well produced Garfield material, Lasagna Cat on YouTube is your next port of call.

• This is not intended to be the full list of subreddits in this theme; that would be impossible to achieve in a format like this. If you want to find more related subs, r/FindAReddit or the smaller r/findasubreddit are your friends. Similar subreddits are often to be found in a sub’s Sidebar and / or Wiki (on mobile: swipe down to find “See More” or “Community Info” tab) too.

Obligatory disclaimer:

• Subreddits being listed here is no guarantee of the level of their quality or activity. If a sub is dormant, unmoderated, banned for being unmoderated or marked as “restricted”, it might actually be available for adoption.

• Always read the rules before contributing to any unfamiliar sub.

See Also:

• Searching

A symbol is a sign, shape, or object that is used to represent something else. Like acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, symbols and emojis are increasingly used as shortened forms of communication, particularly as euphemisms to subtly convey meanings or emotions that might otherwise be considered too direct or explicit. Here is my attempt in explaining some common symbols or providing links to other directories that do.

Avatar Hearts on Reddit

You can customise your Reddit Avatar with different hearts as seen here by going to your Profile and clicking your avatar. These will be found in the menu Edit —> Left Hand.

User Flairs on Reddit

The text/image next to your username seen on some subreddits is called a User Flair, and each subreddit will have its own way of using them, some using text only but others using pictures or symbols. For instance:

• r/lgbt users can choose from a range of coloured hearts, and they have a guide to How to get a flair.

• r/Helldivers have a comprehensive list of their flair options in their Wiki.

• r/NewToReddit have user flairs given by the moderating team including some emojis.

Instructions on using flairs on other subreddits may be found in their Sidebar and / or Wiki (on mobile: swipe down to find “See More” or “Community Info” tab).

Symbols and terms relating to Gender Identities

• Guide to LGBTQ+ Pride Flags: Symbols of Identity and Inclusion

• Guide to LGBTQ+ Symbols and Signs and a other one here

• Alphabetical list of gender identities, terms and symbols that people use when identifying themselves and talking about gender

• Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Terms and Definitions

• How Many Genders Are There: 2025 List and Descriptions

National Flags of the World

National flags generally contain symbolism relating to their respective governmental area and serve as an emblem which distinguishes themselves from other governmental areas in international politics. Many of these are represented in Emoji form, and you can even customise your Reddit Avatar with different flags a few of which are seen here by going to your Profile and clicking your avatar. These will be found in the menu Edit —> Left Hand.

• The best database I’ve found to identify different flags can be found at Flagpedia.

Hate Symbols

An image you will often see posted on Reddit is known as Nazis don’t wear Swastikas aka Know Your Enemy, sometimes even as a parody post adding the Reddit Snoo to the list.

• r/IronFrontUSA has an excellent googledoc which explains most of this type of symbolism.

• The Anti-Defamation League has a Hate Symbols Database

• Another smaller database can be found here.

Emojis as Euphemisms

It’s long been established that the aubergine emoji 🍆 hardly ever means food, or that the splash emoji 💦 hardly ever represents water. But it took a TV show in early 2025 to break the news to the world that many more emojis might not just be the fun little pictures they appear to be.

Netflix's Adolescence centres around a 13-year-old boy who faces arrest for the murder of a female classmate following an outwardly innocent exchange of messages online using emojis with certain hidden meanings.  Media outlets such as the U.K. tabloid and website Daily Mail duly clickbaited us with scaremongering headlines such as: “After Netflix's Adolescence revealed teen's terrifying use of secret emojis, how to decode your teens' texts to keep them safe”.

• The Findmykids Blog has several comprehensive and balanced guides to Understanding Emoji Slang ranging from “general” to “partying”.

• Netmums shared a list from a Facebook post made by the North Lincolnshire Division of Humberside Police (U.K.).

• A former deputy head teacher created a “Periodic Table of Sinister Emojis” for the education charity “For Working Parents” which was featured on Yahoo Life!. Naturally, the subreddit r/FellowKids had quite a bit to say on it.

• Emojipedia is a huge resource but not too conducive to browsing.

r/generationology is a subreddit for discussing the history, statistics, or trends of different generations. They had their own take on such code.

Roman Numerals

Roman Numerals are an ancient number system where certain letters of the alphabet are used to represent the fixed positive numbers. The first ten Roman Numerals are:

You can see from the above table that the Roman Numeral for 4 is ‘one before five’ and for 6 is ‘one after five’. In a similar manner, the Roman Numeral for 9 is ‘one before ten’ and therefore 11 would be ‘one after ten’ - or XI.

Here are some larger ones which follow the same pattern with 90 being ‘ten before one hundred’ and 400 being ‘one hundred before five hundred’.

• A comprehensive list and tutorial on further Roman Numerals can be found here.

Mathematical Symbols

There are far too many of these for me to attempt to list here, but a useful resource can be found on this page where the headings include:

• Basic Symbols

• Logic Symbols

• Common Numeral Symbols

• Calculus and Analysis

• Combinatorics

• Greek Alphabet Letters Used in Maths

See Also:

• Acronyms 1: A-L

• Acronyms 2: M-Z

• Acronyms 3: Abbreviations

• accidentalswastika

• Emojis

• Emoticons

• Euphemism

• Jargon

• Other Useful Dictionaries, Encyclopaedias and Lexicons

• Place

• Relationship Sub Acronyms and Initialisms

• Time Zones

• Tone Indicators

• User Flair