Meme Arrows

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Updated Jan 29, 2025 at 06:45PM EST by LiterallyAustin.

Added Jun 12, 2015 at 02:45PM EDT by Precious Roy.

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About

Meme Arrow is a popular misnomer for the greater-than symbol (">") typically used when expressing implicit statements on 4chan and Reddit. At first, the term was mostly used by outsiders of the aforementioned communities who are unfamiliar with the concept of greentext stories. However, the term "meme arrow" has since been adopted by those who identify themselves with imageboard cultures as well.

Origin

On imageboard communities such as 4chan, the greater-than sign, when used after a line break, allows the user to change the rest of the line's font color to green. While the feature was originally intended to enable posters to differentiate quoted text from their own,^[1] it soon found alternate uses and meanings with the emergence of "greentext" culture, often in conjunction with other well-known terms and phrases like implying, mfw, and [year], as well as green text stories, which are one of 4chan's most popular forms of exported content.

Spread

One of the earliest parodies poking fun at the widespread use of "meme arrows" was uploaded by YouTuber lorem tripsum on September 3rd, 2012 (shown below).

On the following day, a Facebook page^[3] devoted to highlighting greentext stories was launched under the name "Meme Arrows." On September 9th, a screenshot of a /b/ (random) discussion thread about the death of "meme arrows" was posted to the subreddit /r/4chan, where it gained a score of 166 before it was archived.^[2] On November 18th, the very first Urban Dictionary definition for "Meme Arrows" was submitted by user lememe.^[4]