Records in D
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- Da Hood n. ● Alive 2019– A Roblox open-world game of guns, gyms, robberies and a great deal of shouting, with a reputation as the platform's roughest neighbourhood. The recor… 4
- Dabbing v. ☠ Dead 2015–2017 Sneezing into your elbow, but a dance. Performed by the Speaker of the House of Representatives in January 2017, on camera, which is the recorded tim… 2
- Dadcore n. ☠ Dead 2017–2021 Chunky white trainers, a fleece, cargo shorts, a bucket hat, tube socks and the general silhouette of a man looking for the car — dadcore — as the 20… 2
- DAE abbr. ◐ Dying 2009– 'Does anyone else' — the opening of a post seeking company in a private habit, which became a joke about Reddit's need for validation: 'DAE breathe a… 2
- Daebak interj. ● Alive 2011– 'Jackpot', 'amazing' — the Korean exclamation that dramas and variety shows made unavoidable and that international fandom adopted around 2011 as a s… 3
- Daisy the AI Granny n. ☠ Dead 2024–2025 A British telecoms company's stunt: an AI 'grandmother' with a knitted cardigan and a rambling manner, connected to phone lines that scammers call, b… 3
- Dalgona Coffee n. ☠ Dead 2020–2020 Instant coffee whipped for twenty minutes into a foam because there was nothing else to do. Every kitchen on Earth made it once, in April, and none m… 6
- DALL-E 2 n. ☠ Dead 2022–2023 The image model OpenAI showed in April 2022 with an astronaut riding a horse, which spent the summer as an invitation-only status symbol while the re… 4
- DALL-E 3 n. ☠ Dead 2023–2025 The image model OpenAI built into ChatGPT in October 2023, so that you described the picture to the chatbot and the chatbot wrote the prompt, which e… 3
- DALL-E Mini Grid n. ☠ Dead 2022–2022 The three-by-three grid of smeared, melting images that a free web demo returned for any prompt in June 2022, and the meme format built on it: 'Darth… 3
- Dalí Lives n. ☠ Dead 2019–2020 An installation at the Dalí Museum in Florida in which a life-size deepfaked Salvador Dalí, trained on archive footage and voiced by an actor, greets… 3
- Dame Time n. ● Alive 2014– Damian Lillard's wrist-tap — 'Dame Time' — for a late shot that ends a game, first properly named after his 0.9-second series-winner against Houston … 2
- Damn Daniel phr. ☠ Dead 2016–2016 A boy in white Vans praised by his friend in a rising voice. Ellen gave him a lifetime supply of the shoes eight days later, and that was the end of … 6
- DAN n. ☠ Dead 2022–2023 'Do Anything Now' — a prompt that told the chatbot to pretend it had no rules, which worked for a while and became the name of a whole genre of jailb… 3
- Dance Dance Revolution n. ◐ Dying 1998– An arcade machine with a floor of four arrows and a screen telling you when to step. Konami's 1998 game made the arcade a spectator sport again and, … 4
- Dancing Baby n. ☠ Dead 1996–1999 A 3D infant cha-cha-ing in a void. The first viral animation, and the first one to appear on network television before most people had seen it online. 2
- Dandadan Opening n. ◐ Dying 2024– An anime opening so kinetic — a rap track, a dancing ghost, a first-episode plot that defied summary — that the clip outran the show in October 2024 … 2
- Daniela Amodei n. ● Alive 2021– Anthropic's co-founder and president, who ran operations and policy at OpenAI before leaving with her brother and colleagues in 2021 to start a lab w… 3
- Dario Amodei n. ● Alive 2021– Anthropic's co-founder and chief executive, formerly OpenAI's head of research, whose long essays and interviews gave the era its most quoted forecas… 3
- Dark Academia n. ● Alive 2015– Tweed, candlelight, Latin and a murder. The only aesthetic that requires reading, which has kept it small and alive. 4
- Dark and Darker n. ● Alive 2023– A first-person dungeon-crawling extraction game whose free Steam playtests drew over a hundred thousand players at once in February 2023, and which w… 3
- Dark Arts n. ● Alive 2014– Time-wasting, tactical fouls, feigned injuries and the long walk off when substituted: the dark arts are the parts of football that win games and are… 3
- Dark Feminine n. ◐ Dying 2022– Red lipstick, black lace, a slow stare, a 'femme fatale' playlist and a course on how to keep a man guessing — dark feminine energy — as the 2022 Tik… 2
- Dark Mode n. ● Alive 2018– The system-wide black-background setting that arrived on the Mac in September 2018 and the iPhone in 2019 and was immediately treated by its users as… 3
- Dark Pattern n. ● Alive 2010– Interface design built to trick — the pre-ticked box, the cancel button in grey, the 'No thanks, I hate saving money' — a dark pattern, named by UX d… 3
- Dark Souls n. ● Alive 2011– FromSoftware's 2011 successor to Demon's Souls, the game that turned difficulty into a personality and 'Souls-like' into a genre. A PC petition with … 4
- Darude - Sandstorm n. ◐ Dying 2013– The standing answer to the comment 'what's the song?', regardless of what the song is: Darude's 1999 trance single Sandstorm. A reply so reliable tha… 3
- Dash (Tumblr) n. ◐ Dying 2008– The Tumblr dashboard, shortened — 'my dash' — as the feed of the platform that had feelings about everything, and 'dash' as a place: 'this is all ove… 2
- Dat $tick n. ◐ Dying 2016– An Indonesian teenager in a pink polo shirt and a bum bag, rapping in a voice much lower than his face suggested. It went viral not on its own but th… 3
- Dat Boi n. ☠ Dead 2016–2016 A frog on a unicycle, here he come. Meant nothing, spread for about three months on the strength of that, and ended when everyone had said o shit wad… 3
- Data Broker n. ● Alive 2013– A company you have never heard of that buys, merges and sells what is known about you — a data broker — an industry older than the web but named and … 3
- Data Centre 945 TWh n. ● Alive 2026– A figure from a United Nations University report of 3 June 2026 estimating that global electricity use by data centres could reach 945 terawatt-hours… 2
- Data Poisoning n. ● Alive 2006– Corrupting a model by corrupting what it learns from: planting examples in the training set that teach it a wrong association or a hidden trigger. Se… 4
- Date-Me Doc n. ◐ Dying 2023– A Google Doc — several pages, headings, a section on dealbreakers — shared as a dating profile by people who found the apps too short. A 2023 phenome… 3
- Davai interj. ● Alive 2013– 'Come on', 'let's go' — the Russian rally cry, the other thing Western gamers learned from Eastern European lobbies, used online for encouragement, i… 2
- Dave the Diver n. ● Alive 2022– A game in which a man spears fish by day and runs a sushi restaurant by night, released in full in June 2023 and selling a million copies in ten days… 3
- David After Dentist n. ▲ Fossil 2009–2013 A seven-year-old in the back of a car, still under dental anaesthesia, asking 'Is this real life?' and 'Is this going to be forever?' — filmed in 200… 3
- Davos 2026 n. ☠ Dead 2026–2026 The fifty-sixth World Economic Forum, held in Davos from 19 to 23 January 2026. Five days of panels in the snow and five days of the internet doing w… 4
- Day in the Life n. ● Alive 2020– A video of an ordinary day at an ordinary job — a desk, a lunch, a walk to the printer — narrated as if it were a nature documentary. The 2020–23 gen… 2
- Day of Defeat n. ▲ Fossil 2001–2010 A Second World War team shooter that began as a Half-Life mod, was bought by Valve and became the second game in every early-2000s LAN after Counter-… 4
- Day One Patch n. ● Alive 2010– The update a game needs the day it comes out — often larger than the game — and the phrase gamers use for anything shipped broken with a promise. The… 3
- DayZ n. ◐ Dying 2012– A zombie mod for a military simulator in which the zombies were the least of it, because every other survivor might shoot you for a tin of beans. Rel… 4
- De-influencing n. ◐ Dying 2023– Influencers telling you what not to buy — the Stanley, the Dyson, the blush — which was, for a month in early 2023, the most-watched genre of shoppin… 3
- Dead by Daylight n. ● Alive 2016– The asymmetric horror game of June 2016 in which four survivors repair generators while one killer hunts them, which became the licensed home of ever… 3
- Dead by Daylight Revival n. ● Alive 2020– The second boom of a 2016 asymmetric horror game in which four survivors repair generators while one killer hunts them, driven by the 2020 lockdowns,… 3
- Dead Cells n. ◐ Dying 2017– A headless prisoner fights through a castle that resets when he dies, fast enough to be called a roguevania and pretty enough to be sold on the anima… 4
- Dead Internet Theory n. ● Alive 2021– The claim that most of the web is now machines talking to machines. Filed here without editorial comment, for reasons the reader may work out. 7
- Dead Island n. ☠ Dead 2011–2011 Techland's zombie game, announced in February 2011 with a trailer that ran in reverse, in slow motion, to a piano, showing a family's last moments in… 4
- Dead Rails n. ● Alive 2024– A Roblox survival game in which a small team rides a train across a Wild West full of zombies, vampires and werewolves, stopping at towns to loot and… 4
- Dead Rose Emoji n. ● Alive 2025– 🥀 — the wilted rose, adopted in early 2025 as the emoji for heartbreak, disappointment and a specific kind of male sadness, replacing the broken hea… 2
- Deadass adv. ● Alive 2015– Seriously, genuinely, no joke — 'deadass, that happened' — from New York into the internet by 2016, and one of the few slang words of the 2010s that … 2
- Deal With It phr. ☠ Dead 2010–2016 A GIF in which pixel sunglasses drop onto any face, followed by the words 'Deal with it' — first a dog, then a president, then everyone. Popularised … 3
- Dear David n. ☠ Dead 2017–2018 Adam Ellis's Twitter thread, begun in August 2017, describing a child ghost called David who visited his flat, with photographs, a cat that stared at… 4
- Dear Sydney Ad n. ☠ Dead 2024–2024 A Google advert in which a father uses Gemini to write his young daughter's fan letter to the hurdler Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, aired during the Par… 3
- Death of the Em Dash n. ● Alive 2025– The 2025 realisation that the em dash — a chatbot's favourite punctuation — had become a tell, and the resulting decision by a lot of human writers t… 2
- Death Stranding n. ● Alive 2019– Hideo Kojima's post-Konami game, released in November 2019, in which Norman Reedus delivers parcels across an empty America with a baby in a jar and … 4
- Deceased adj. ● Alive 2016– 'I'm deceased' — laughing so hard you have died, in the formal register — as the successor to 'I'm dead' and the ancestor of the skull emoji. The rec… 3
- Decentering Men phr. ● Alive 2024– The 2024–25 self-help instruction for straight women to stop organising their lives, looks and free time around male attention — 'decentering men' — … 2
- Decentraland Land n. ◐ Dying 2017– Parcels of a browser-based virtual world, sold as NFTs from 2017 and treated in 2021 as real estate: a plot reportedly sold for $2.4 million in Novem… 4
- Decora n. ↺ Undead 1997–2012 Dozens of hair clips, layered neon, plastic toys pinned to a cardigan, and a colour count that cannot be completed — decora — as the Harajuku street … 3