Memes

● Aliven.✎ 3

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

The French turn-based RPG from a small studio, released on 24 April 2025, that beat the year's big-budget games to every award, made 'the Paintress' and 'Gestral' vocabulary, and turned 'made by 30 people' into a rallying cry against the industry. The record's entry for the game that made an entire internet weep about a parry.

▸ 2025peak 2025still up

● Aliven.✎ 2

Cogsucker

An insult for a person too fond of AI — the human counterpart to clanker, coined in the same summer. Filed as evidence that the internet builds slurs for robots and their friends faster than it builds anything else.

▸ 2025peak 2025still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 2

Conclave Memes

Two days in May when the whole internet watched a chimney: smoke-colour speculation, fantasy cardinals, the film Conclave treated as a tactical manual. Ended, as it had to, with white smoke and a new set of jokes.

▸ 2025peak 2025†2025

● Aliven.✎ 2

Creatine Girlies

The 2025 wave of women taking creatine, the gym supplement long marketed to men, and posting about it — 'creatine girlies' — with the usual arc of discovery, evangelism, water-retention jokes and a gummy version. The record's entry for the year a tub of white powder became a personality.

▸ 2025peak 2025still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 2

DeepSeek Moment

A Monday in January when a Chinese model that cost a fraction of the American ones topped the app store and wiped hundreds of billions off chip stocks. Named like a Sputnik moment, memed like a stock crash: whale emojis everywhere.

▸ 2025peak 2025†2025

● Aliven.✎ 2

Derpy Tiger

The big blue tiger from KPop Demon Hunters, with an expression somewhere between a shrine guardian and a labrador that has been told it is a good boy. Plush toys, stickers, and the summer's most-drawn animal.

▸ 2025peak 2025still up

● Alivephr.✎ 2

Devour Feculence

Severance's corporate-liturgical way of saying 'eat shit', delivered by Milchick with a smile, and adopted immediately as the internet's most polite insult. Printed on mugs by the end of the month.

▸ 2025peak 2025still up

● Aliveabbr.✎ 2

DtMF

'I should have taken more photos' — the title track of Bad Bunny's January 2025 album, which became a TikTok format for slideshows of the people and places you did not photograph enough. A song that made a whole platform sentimental in a week.

▸ 2025peak 2025still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 3

Duo's Death

Duolingo announcing on 11 February 2025 that Duo, its guilt-tripping green owl mascot, had died — with a cause of death 'probably waiting for you to do your lesson' — as a week-long stunt that ended with the owl revived and the app briefly beloved. The record's entry for the mascot funeral that was also a push notification.

▸ 2025peak 2025†2025

● Aliven.✎ 3

Egg Prices

The early-2025 meme cycle about American eggs costing more than most things — 'egg prices' — with photos of empty shelves, a carton in a locked cabinet, eggs as a status symbol and 'egg' jokes as political shorthand. The record's entry for the breakfast that briefly became a stock ticker.

▸ 2025peak 2025still up

● Alivephr.✎ 3

Flint and Steel

One of the lines that turned Minecraft Movie screenings into a participation sport, shouted in unison at the moment the item appears. Cinemas put up signs. The signs became memes.

▸ 2025peak 2025still up

● Aliven.✎ 2

Floodlighting

Oversharing your trauma on a first date to force intimacy — a floodlight where a candle would do. Named in January 2025 as a dating red flag, and immediately recognised by everyone who had done it.

▸ 2025peak 2025still up

● Aliven.✎ 2

Frieren Looking Up

An amateur drawing of Frieren from an upward angle whose chin came out flat, pointed and geologically wrong. Reposted with love rather than cruelty: hundreds of redraws either fixed the jaw or made it worse, and the artist thanked everyone. Also called the Friangle.

▸ 2025peak 2025still up

● Aliven.✎ 2

GTA 6 Delay

The moment in May 2025 when the most-anticipated game ever was pushed to 2026, and the second moment in November when it was pushed again. The internet's coping mechanism was to date everything in 'GTA 6 units': marriages, degrees, the heat death of the universe.

▸ 2025peak 2025still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

Gen Beta

The generation born from 2025, named before its first member was, and memed before it could hold a phone. Jokes about what Beta slang will be, and about the fact that the Alphas are now the older kids.

▸ 2025peak 2025still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

Golden (Huntr/x)

The soaring signature song of the fictional girl group Huntr/x from Netflix's June 2025 animated hit KPop Demon Hunters — 'Golden' — which reached number one in the US and UK, was screamed at singalong screenings and became the first song from a cartoon to top the charts since Frozen. The record's entry for the anthem that every seven-year-old can hit the high note of, allegedly.

▸ 2025peak 2025still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

Great Meme Reset

A movement, half serious, to reset meme culture on 1 January 2026: retire the AI slop and the deliberate nonsense, bring back Big Chungus and Nyan Cat. Whether it worked is disputed; that people felt the need to schedule it is the record.

▸ 2025peak 2026still up

● Alivephr.✎ 2

Grok Is This True

The reflex of tagging the platform's chatbot under any claim — '@grok is this true' — and treating the answer as settled. Became a joke about outsourcing judgement, and then a joke about the bot's answers, and then simply a thing people did.

▸ 2025peak 2025still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

Grokipedia

An encyclopaedia written by a chatbot, launched as a rival to the one written by people. The internet's response was to compare articles side by side and screenshot the differences, which is the only review it needed.

▸ 2025peak 2025still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

Grow a Garden

A Roblox farming game so calm that it broke the platform's concurrent-player records: plant, wait, sell, repeat. Reported to have been made by a teenager. The summer of 2025's most-played game was about watering things.

▸ 2025peak 2025still up

● Alivephr.✎ 3

Holy Airball

The two-part format where a caption sets up a promising fact — 'she said she loves basketball' — and the follow-up reveals it was a miss — 'holy airball', from the basketball term for a shot that touches nothing. The record's entry for the May 2025 meme that turned dating disappointment into sports commentary.

▸ 2025peak 2025still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

Horse Race Tests

A daily video of crude coloured horses racing through a maze toward a carrot, posted by a game developer as a physics test. X turned it into a sport: fan art, rivalries, and a national investment in the cyan horse, who never won.

▸ 2025peak 2025still up

● Alivephr.✎ 3

I Am Steve

Jack Black's opening line in A Minecraft Movie, delivered with total sincerity, which cinema audiences learned to shout back at the screen along with 'chicken jockey' and 'flint and steel'. The rowdy-screening phenomenon of 2025.

▸ 2025peak 2025still up

◐ Dyingphr.✎ 2

Jet2 Holiday

'Nothing beats a Jet2 holiday' — a budget airline's cheerful advert audio, laid over footage of holidays going catastrophically wrong: camels attacking, boats sinking, a man falling through a table. The sound of British summer 2025.

▸ 2025peak 2025still up

● Aliven.✎ 2

Job Hugging

Clinging to a job you do not like because the market is worse. The consultancy word for a very old feeling, coined in August 2025 and adopted immediately because everybody was doing it.

▸ 2025peak 2025still up

● Aliven.✎ 2

KPop Demon Hunters

An animated film about a girl group who fight demons between shows, which became the most-watched thing on Netflix and the source of a summer's worth of memes: 'Golden' as an anthem, the Saja Boys as the villains people fancied, and a tiger with a face nobody could explain.

▸ 2025peak 2025still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 3

Kangaroo Boarding a Plane

A kangaroo at an airport gate holding a boarding pass while a woman argues with staff, shared by millions as an 'emotional support kangaroo'. It was generated. The reveal did not stop people wanting it to be true.

▸ 2025peak 2025†2025

☠ Deadn.✎ 3

Katy Perry in Space

Eleven minutes above the Kármán line, a kiss for the ground on return, a flower held up to the sky. The internet's response was immediate and total, and for a season 'Katy Perry went to space' was the benchmark for effort out of proportion to result.

▸ 2025peak 2025†2025

● Aliven.✎ 3

Kwebbelkop Laugh

A wheezing, collapsing laugh from streamer YourRAGE that TikTok decided belonged to Dutch YouTuber Kwebbelkop, and never corrected. Used as the laugh track for anything too stupid to respond to in words. A meme built on a misattribution that stuck.

▸ 2025peak 2026still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

Lafufu

A fake Labubu — the bootleg with the wrong number of teeth, the eyes slightly too far apart, the smile that looks like it knows what it did. Named by the internet and then loved by it, arguably more than the real thing.

▸ 2025peak 2025still up

● Aliven.✎ 2

Liquid Glass

Apple's translucent, refractive redesign of its software announced in June 2025 — 'Liquid Glass' — which was memed for its unreadable notifications, compared to Windows Vista within the hour and dialled back through the beta period. The record's entry for the design language whose first review was a screenshot of text you could not read.

▸ 2025peak 2025still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 2

Louvre Heist

A daytime robbery of the crown jewels using a furniture lift, and the internet's delight at a museum with Windows 2000 passwords. Memes about security, the getaway, and the exact number of minutes the whole thing took.

▸ 2025peak 2025†2025

● Aliven.✎ 3

Love Island USA Season 7

The June–July 2025 season of Love Island USA that became the most streamed reality season in America, produced 'Amaya Papaya', Nicolandria and the 'Huda' discourse, and turned a mid-week episode into an event with watch parties in bars. The record's entry for the summer the villa took over the group chat.

▸ 2025peak 2025still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

Matcha Man

The uniform of the performative male: iced matcha, tote bag, wired earphones, a Labubu on the strap. Contests were held in parks to find the most performative man, and the winners were sincerely embarrassed, which was the point.

▸ 2025peak 2025still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

Matcha Shortage

The 2025 discovery that the internet had drunk enough green tea to empty Japan of it: shops rationing tins, cafés apologising, and a whole aesthetic — strawberry matcha, matcha girl — briefly threatened by supply chains.

▸ 2025peak 2025still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

Micro-Retirement

Taking a few months off between jobs and calling it retirement, in miniature. A rebrand of the gap year for people with a pension app, and 2025's preferred way to describe being unemployed on purpose.

▸ 2025peak 2025still up

● Aliven.✎ 2

Microcheating

The small betrayals that are not affairs: the saved photo, the late-night reply, the ex's story watched at 2 a.m. Named in early 2025, argued about immediately, and still unresolved.

▸ 2025peak 2025still up

● Aliven.✎ 2

Microretirement

Taking a deliberate break of weeks or months from work in your twenties or thirties rather than waiting for the real thing — a 'microretirement' — as the early-2025 rebrand of a gap year for people with a mortgage in their future. The record's entry for the trend that repackaged 'quitting for a bit' as a life plan.

▸ 2025peak 2025still up

● Aliven.✎ 2

Nano Banana

An image-editing model that went by a codename on a leaderboard before Google admitted it was theirs. The name stuck harder than the product's: people asked for a 'nano banana' the way they once asked for a photoshop.

▸ 2025peak 2025still up

● Aliven.✎ 2

Nanoship

A relationship so small it never happened: eye contact on a train, a shared laugh in a queue, a like on a story. Named by a dating app in December 2025, and adopted by people who needed a word for the crush they had for four minutes.

▸ 2025peak 2026still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

Nicolandria

Nic Vansteenberghe and Olandria Carthen — 'Nicolandria' — the friends-to-couple pairing on the seventh season of Love Island USA whose slow burn, and the internet's campaign for it, became the summer 2025 reality-TV obsession. The record's entry for the ship that was crewed mostly by strangers.

▸ 2025peak 2025still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

Nintendo Switch 2

Nintendo's successor console, revealed in January 2025 and launched on 5 June 2025 to record sales and a two-month argument about its price, the cost of Mario Kart World and whether $80 games were now normal. The record's entry for the console that sold out while everyone complained about it.

▸ 2025peak 2025still up

● Aliven.✎ 2

No-Buy Year

A year of buying nothing that is not essential, announced in January with a list of rules and, usually, abandoned by March with a haul. The frugality trend of 2025, and the one people posted about most while breaking.

▸ 2025peak 2025still up

● Alivephr.✎ 3

Ok Garmin

'Ok Garmin, Video speichern' — a German driver, having just avoided a crash, calmly instructing his dashcam to save the clip. The audio became the sound of surviving anything: laid over near-misses, game footage, and cars leaving the road like aircraft.

▸ 2025peak 2025still up

● Aliven.✎ 2

Ordinary (Alex Warren)

The stomping, hymn-shaped ballad released in February 2025 that spent much of the year at number one in the US and the UK, soundtracked every wedding video on the internet and started the 'is it good or is it just loud' argument — 'Ordinary'. The record's entry for the song that was both a first dance and a discourse.

▸ 2025peak 2025still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

PEAK

A four-player climbing game made in a month, in which you and your friends scale a mountain, eat questionable mushrooms, and fall. The summer's co-op game, and the reason 'peak' regained a literal meaning for a few weeks.

▸ 2025peak 2025still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

Pedro Pascal Anxiety Touching

Pedro Pascal on a press tour, hand on the arm of whoever was nearest, described by himself as anxiety and by the internet as a whole personality. Became a template for 'me at a party' and a brief debate about touching.

▸ 2025peak 2025still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 3

Penguin Tariffs

The April 2025 discovery that the US tariff list included the Heard and McDonald Islands, an uninhabited Antarctic territory whose only residents are penguins and seals — 'penguin tariffs' — and the week of memes in which the penguins responded. The record's entry for the trade war's most photogenic front.

▸ 2025peak 2025†2025