bigim

About

Bigim is a nonsense word that was coined by users on 4chan in a forced attempt to fool people into thinking it is an Internet slang term.

Origin

On September 25th, 2012, an anonymous 4chan user started a thread on /b/ (random) board^[1] with the following proposal:

"I have an idea. Why don't we come up with a word and spam it all over the internet.This words true meaning will only be known to the few select users that see this post."

The original poster's proposal was quickly met by positive responses from others and the thread went on to generate more than 580 text replies and image macros incorporating the word "bigim" prior to being archived.

Spread

There is little evidence of its spread outside of 4chan, however, in the original thread, many users discussed the logistics of building hype around the word, mainly by planting mysterious posts with the title "bigim" on a number of memetic hubsites like Reddit, Urban Dictionary, Omegle, FunnyJunk^[2], Yahoo Answers^[5] and Tumblr.^[4] However, many individual attempts to spread the word were presumably removed by the moderators within the first 24 hours.

Throughout the process, hundreds of image macros featuring the word "bigim" or its variations were produced. Meanwhile, the word "bigim" continued to spread across other imageboards^[3] on 4chan and in response to its sudden influx, some users began criticizing the phenomenon as immature and unoriginal, while others called for an autoban policy against posters who use the word on the site.

Notable Examples

Search Interest

External References