The Etymology of UwU

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UwU

UwU
[loudly] UwU

I imagine that you are familiar with UwU as a meme.

Something people say when they're kind of trying to be annoying or ironic or make fun of this

overly cutesy way of speaking that you associate with furries or cat girls...

Is that what the kids are doing these days? Cat girls?

But have you ever asked yourself, why?

What- Why? What is this?

UwU?

That's not similar to any sort of existing English word.

Why are we saying that?

How did we as a society land on this being a normal thing to say?

Welp. Okay, I'm going to be real. I was feeling a little bit uninspired this week.

Nothing on my long list of video ideas that I have was really doing it for me.

So of course I took to Tumblr. I asked for video idea suggestions.

And somebody suggested I look into the history of UwU.

And I immediately thought, "Oh my God
yeah, what is the deal with UwU?"

Creative block just immediately obliterated. Thank you,

This is what I have decided I need to know about.

Tasty treat for my brain, and for yours now as well

because I am very excited to tell you that UwU has a surprisingly interesting and winding internet history.

But before we go any further, a word from today's sponsor, Audible.

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And now I return you to your regularly scheduled content.

What we know for certain about UwU, to start off, is that it was never intended to be a word.

It started out as an emoticon.

An expressive face made out of keyboard characters to help convey tone when typing.

You know, in like ye olden days before emojis were a thing.

There have been two cited supposed origins or earliest known usages of UwU.

A Yu-Gi-Oh fanfiction from 2005, which was thought to be the earliest for a long time.

And a post on a furry Forum from the year 2000, which was found more recently.

Are either of these things legitimate milestones in the history of UwU?

I'm gonna tell ya, because surprisingly,

despite how old both of these posts are, I have managed to talk to the authors of both.

And I've got some answers for you.

Regarding the Yu-Gi-Oh fanfiction, it's entitled "Genie of the Puzzle" and was posted to Fanfiction.net in October of 2005.

The opening author's note states,

"Wheee! Sarah/ryoulover4ever was my 200th reviewer! I'm sorry this took so long! -/smacks self/-

"Again, feel free to throw squids and fish at me, UwU I know I deserve it

"This is just a little filler to prove I'm not dead. Things start getting interesting next chapter!"

The person who contacted me claiming authorship of this fanfiction was upfront about the fact that

they do not have access to the account anymore, and can't exactly prove that it's them.

But, given that they wanted to remain anonymous anyway and weren't making any sort of bold claims like having invented UwU,

like, I don't really see what there is to gain from lying about this?

I don't think I have any reason not to believe them.

So, I asked them a couple questions about how UwU made its way into their vocabulary around 2005.

So, according to the author of one Yu-Gi-Oh fanfiction that is probably older than some of you watching this video right now.

According to them, it was like a common alternative to- almost like a smiley face emoji.

Except mimicking a cute, anime character-like expression.

"so at the time it was just a genuine cute emoji

"it didn't have any of the irony you usually associate with it now (at least in my circles).

"it was just a genuine" smiley face "but cuter and more anime

"i also 100% did not make it up; i don't know the technicalities of how they landed on my fic for it, but it was widely used in like AIM/irc/all the popular weeb chat channels of the time,

"which is how it got into my vocab."

At this point, the UwU emoticon already had a lot of...
really similar-looking emoticon siblings.

And these emoticons had a logic to them.

The U's in UwU were closed eyes.
The W was a cat-like mouth.

Thus, giving UwU this general vibe of
cuteness and serenity and general happiness.

So that's where it was at in 2005.

But, we can go earlier.

At some point in the past year I think,
so pretty recently,

an even earlier usage of UwU was discovered.

It's from a post on a very old furry art website, called VCL

or Vixen Controlled Library.

I don't think this website exists anymore. I think we just have this post from archives.

"Here's a close-up portrait of Felina... I kinda messed up with the Photoshop on this one...

"I think the burn tool would've been better than painting over the lines... UwU"

It was made on April 11th, 2000.

Which is, wait oh my God, what day is it today?

[laughing]
It's April 9th the day that I'm filming
this. Oh my God.

Edit this video in two days, so
I can post it on the 24th birthday of UwU!

No, the sponsor will not approve it in that short of a time.

It would've been so good.
It would've been so good!

So, this post was made by an artist named Ghislain Deslierres.

I am pronouncing that to the best of my ability.

His Twitter bio claims, "Creator of UwU"

Though, he told me that there very well
could be earlier usages of it found

because, it really wasn't that unique.

As far as he remembers and it- it was
24 years ago, but as far as he remembers,

UwU was a variant that he created on this Emoji, which was already a variant of this Emoji.

But remember, the U's in UwU are swapped in,
as opposed to other eye variants,

to signify closed eyes.

And in this context, Ghislain says he was
using it to convey sadness, actually.

He was disappointed with the way that the
drawing he posted that day had turned out.

While the closed eyes of UwU were later agreed upon to be serene and happy,

His intuition behind giving it closed eyes was to make it sad.

Which I think is so interesting.

Um, in the earliest example we have of it being used, it's being used to mean the complete opposite of what it means now.

This is, at this point, the earliest usage of UwU that we have.

But it probably isn't the origin of UwU.

Like, it's not like he created it in this post and
then it caught on from that specific point.

I think Ghislain was extremely informative, um, when he told me about how it was very influenced by previous emoticons,

and other people easily could have come up with it as well.

And I think that is likely, a lot of people probably did think of something like this independently.

And you know, eventually a meaning was widely agreed upon by the community.

So, now we need to talk a little bit more about emoticons in the early 2000s.

Both Ghislain Deslierres and the author of the Yu-Gi-Oh fanfiction brought up Kaomoji.

Japanese emoticons with a decidedly cute aesthetic emphasizing large eyes.

While Western emoticons have typically focused on the mouth to convey expression.

Japanese emoticons focus more on the eyes.

They're thought to have originally been
popularized by manga fans

in Japan in the '80s and '90s.

And later, in the late '90s, early 2000s

made their way into Western internet
users' vocabularies through anime fandom.

Which of course, has a not insignificant overlap with furries.

And I think we can absolutely see the influence of Kaomojis on UwU.

Especially, when we look at the Kaomoji cat face.

Other examples like the Kaomoji used in that popular "hold my flower" Tumblr post.

These are, I think, the predecessors to UwU.

I think that UwU and its similar-looking, cousin emoticons

were easy ways of typing almost Kaomoji-looking emoticons on Western keyboards.

I received a lot of testimonies from very helpful people on Tumblr regarding

the early 2000s popularity of this kind of Kaomojis on Western keyboards hybrid emoticon style that was going on.

"I remember seeing it on AIM in the early
2000s, I always saw it as an offshoot of
this more popular style of emotes.

"It used 'w' as the mouth because it looked
like a monster or an animal mouth, so a
lot of furries and weebs would use it.

"It's possible that it had multiple
heritages though, mixing together
Japanese and Western style emotes."

"Oh yeah! Playing around with the 'mouth' used in emotes was a common thing people did.

"'Smiley face mouth' vs 'this smiley face mouth' vs 'V mouth' or the '3 for the mouth',

"or 'line mouth' vs 'dot
mouth' vs '3 mouth' for vertical ones.

"So using 'w' as a mouth was kind of
just another one of those.

"I remember
seeing the 'line' and the 'dot' mouths the
earliest, the rest coming later."

"in the mid 2000s i knew someone who used it alongside 'this emote' and they said

" "'this one' is kind of like a happy face and uwu is more pensive" and i don't know what to think anymore with the popular usage nowadays."

"I remember it being part of the 'random' aesthetic i.e. uwu glomps you"

Oh my God thank you for... that.

"From what I remember from the early 2010s on tumblr and deviantart, it was used as an emoticon representation of a relaxed but happy, cutesy anime face.

"It kind of became this way of showcasing you were an anime loving, glomping, squeeing, kind of person, trying to evoke the mannerisms and movements of a cute anime girl

the mannerisms and movements of a cute anime girl (not necessarily all mutually inclusive).

"At least, that's how it was used in circles I was in."

"folks have said it, but as someone who has been in the anime
community mines for years, it's basically simplified kaomoji

"(a lot more elaborate kaomoji using stuff in Japanese keyboards or obscure symbols).

"I'm not sure if I saw uwu specifically in my deviantArt or Gaia days,

"because no one was being bashful there

"(which is what uwu originally kinda indicates, it's like 'serene closed eyes and cat mouth'),

"but I saw plenty of 'this' and 'this' and the occasional OwO"

People mention seeing it on a whole variety of sites,

DeviantArt, Omegle, Fur Affinity, Gaia Online, LiveJournal, Myspace,

and even anime roleplay communities on Facebook.

So it was very popular in those sorts of spaces, but not outside of them.

In fact, association with- with those particular fandom subculture niches, kind of made UwU cringe.

Furries and anime fans... get a lot of shit, okay?

We all- we all know that.

They- they get made fun of a lot.

Um, and so UwU was considered, uh, like a signifier of cringe.

And then around the mid 2010s,

oh my God.
It breached containment.

The first posts that more widely called attention to UwU being a thing

were Tumblr posts, I believe.

Generally, these posts leaned into the fact that it was considered cringe.

Sprinkled it in to get a reaction out of people.

To make their trolling extra annoying, to make fun of the type of person who would unironically use UwU.

Apparently there was a brief kerfuffle created by like Tumblr social justice types,

Basically, saying that UwU was going to become a way for old creeps to mimic

the speech of young kids and pretend to be young kids on the internet to pray on them.

Really, really dumb.

But it all contributed to the larger internet's knowledge of UwU existing.

And it's not necessarily easy, I think, to decipher UwU as like, an emoticon.

As something that's supposed to look like a face at a first glance.

You know, at least to Western audiences who are used to looking at Western emoticons.

This doesn't necessarily look like one at first to a lot of people.

So they started pronouncing it as a word.

We're so accustomed to hearing it out loud now. Like, we're so accustomed to saying it.

UwU.

It's- UwU is a word that you can say with your mouth.

Um, but it's- it's really significant I don't want to gloss over this point

'cause it's really significant that it went from an image,

like a soundless image of a face, uh, an emoticon.

The fact that it went from that, to a word that you say is huge.

And that was the result of it breaching containment of

these small communities that understood how it was supposed to be read.

It totally changed what UwU is.

But we're not done, because in the late 2010s, UwU just absolutely skyrocketed in popularity.

Alongside, of course, its variant, OwO.

Following emoticon logic, OwO would be a version with like wide-open eyes.

Therefore making it more shocked or curious.

Hence the- hence the popular phrase, "OwO what's this?"

And then there was... [sighs]

And then there was the copypasta.

The copypasta that starts, "Rawr nuzzles you how are you pounces on you you're so warm UwU"

Uh, and then proceeds to get extremely sexual from there.

That copypasta.

There was that.

And then, in 2018, somebody decided to make a rap version of it and post it on YouTube.

♪ RAWR!! x3 nuzzles! pounces on u ♪

♪ uwu u so warm ♪

And, um, yeah that- um this happened.

It became an extremely popular TikTok song.

One of you told me on Tumblr that UwU is for, and I quote, "Cat girls with purple LEDs on Twitch."

Um, and others noted this kind of mysterious resurgence

in popularity among the younger generation or connected it to TikTok fashions.

And you guys are not crazy, okay? We have- the graph.

No, not that.
We have- the graph.

So this TikTok trend adapted from this YouTube video, adapted from this copypasta,

uh, adapted from- I guess, a wider culture of ironically or making fun of UwU.

Um, is the reason why it is so popular right now.

What's really interesting to me, is that if you look at the copypasta

that was, you know, responsible for this huge trend that made UwU popular-

UwU isn't spelled "UwU" in it.

It's spelled like this.

But the video that adapted it pronounced it "UwU".

UwU has transcended UwU.

Do- Do you understand?

Do I understand!?

Okay. Let's look at another post that is famously associated with UwU.

The "hello Mr Obama then Parish" roleplay post from Tumblr.

I'm sorry if you don't know what I'm talking about.

"Hewwo, is anybody thewe?"

"Cave slowly begins to fill with water."

"Hewwo pwease somebody hewp me.
Hewwo?"

"You can feel the surface of the water barely lapping at you."

"N-N-N-No! Hewwo? Hewwo, help me."

"God wwest youw soul."

"Hewwo! Ma'am, why awe you doing this to me?

"Hewwo? Hewp me pwease."

"[hums]"

"Mr Obama, is that you? Hewwo? Pwease hewp me.

"I seem to be in a wittle bit of twubble Mr Obama

"Hewwo? Hewwo?"

"[hums]"

"Pwease Mr Obama, pwease save me. I downt wanna die."

"Hewwo, Mr Obama awe you still thewe?"

"[hums]"

"M-Mr Obama, pwease. I'm drowning. Hewwo? I'm scared.

"I'll do anything fow you Mr Obama, pwease hewp."

"Anything?"

"Anything for you Mr Obama!"

"Then perish."

UwU never appears in this post, either!

Just "hewwo" and "pwease" and other sort of UwU-ified words.

"UwU speak" has come to mean either like a cutesy, childlike
voice.

Uh, such as we see used in the song version.

Or this like, fully UwU-ified
language.

As is very nicely put by this tweet, UwU is a way of life.

UwU is a way of life now!

It's a word you say, rather than just an emoticon you use when you're trying to convey that you are cute.

It's a way of speaking in a cutesy way.

It's a way of typing words to convey that you're speaking in a cutesy way.

It's a word you say when you're trying to be annoying or ironic and make fun of people who want to be cute.

And finally, at the very bottom of the list. You may, somewhere, still find people who

are using UwU as an emoticon that looks like a happy cat-like face.

UwU continues to transcend.

And I wish you all of the UwU-ing you could ever desire in your life.

I- this- honestly, this was a fun thing for my brain to chew on this week.

If you guys have any more suggestions that are kind of up this alley of like,

things I can research kind of quickly?

But that are still like, surprisingly interesting. Like weird little tidbits of internet history like this.

If you know of anything like this-

Doesn't have to be related to emoticons or language or anything like that.

If it is, that's great. But it doesn't have to be that.

But anything that's kind of just like a weird tidbit of internet history like this.

Tell me your suggestions. I will be reading the comments.

Thank you so much for watching, and I will see you in another video next week.

[synth music]

[Captioned by faeshyye]