Sliding tiles together until they reached a number. Made in a weekend, played by everyone for a month, and still installed on the phones of people who forgot.
The headnote is right but it undersells how ordinary this was at the time. Nobody using 2048 in 2014 thought of it as a thing with a name; it was just how you talked, and naming it is what started the clock.
For anyone arriving from the 2010s: 2048 is one of those terms that meant something narrow first and something broad later, and the two definitions were used at each other for years before anyone noticed.
For the record — a grandparent's group chat, screenshot attached, seen 20 January. 2048, with quotation marks around it, which is how an institution says it has heard of something.
What does it mean? Write it the way you would say it out loud.
