Birbs

About

"Birb" is an internet slang term to refer to birds; usually featuring birds that are exceptionally cute, humorous, and most notably smol.

Origin

The earliest known use of the word birb in this context was on November 17th, 2012, when it was tweeted by the popular bird-themed Twitter BirdsRightsActivist.^[1] The tweet received 87 retweets and 83 favorites in three years.

Spread

On April 15th, 2014, Twitter user @ryanpequin tweeted "I misspelled bird 'birb' and I'm laughing at that and maybe I'm freaking out a little I don't know."

On April 16th, the user teh3mo submitted a post to the subreddit /r/funny entitled "We are birb. We must dance." featuring a GIF of a blue parakeet reacting to a stuffed parakeet.^[2] The post received 3,181 points (94% upvoted). On October 2nd, 2014, Birb was first defined in this context in Urban Dictionary; the poster defined birb as a term related to Doge and LOLcats. ^[3] The birb subreddit /r/birbs was founded on December 14th, 2014, and as of November 2015 has over 10,000 subscribers.^[4] The subreddit defines birbs as "Birbs are birds that are being funny, cute, or silly in some way." In the Steven Universe fandom, the term "birb" has become closely affiliated with the main character Pearl; whose facial features have gotten her the nickname "Bird Mom" (shown below).

Birb is in common use in social media as a way to refer to cute bird videos or posts. On Tumblr, thousands of posts have been created with the hashtag.^[5] There are 1,670 video results on Vine,^[6] and over 13,600 tagged posts on Instagram.^[7] As of November, 2015, the word birb is tweeted about 250 times per day, averaging around 7,000 uses per month. ^[8][9] On DeviantArt, there are over 10,000 deviations tagged with #birb.

Borb

Search Interest

External References