About

No Shit, Sherlock refers to an expression made by an individual in response to a statement that is considered obvious or stupid, similar to the term . The express is in reference to the character Sherlock Holmes created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who is known for making correct assumptions during his investigations.

Origin

The expression is believed to have originated between the 1940's to 1950's. One of the first known uses of the expression in popular culture was in the 1986 movie Little Shop of Horrors.

Spread

On November 30th, 2004, Urban Dictionary user =virus.exe= submitted an entry regarding the expression.^[1] On September 2nd, 2009, The NoShitSherlock subreddit was launched which highlights online news headlines with obvious statements. As of September, 2015, the subreddit has gathered over 15.000 readers.^[4]
Discussions with the expression can be found a number of sites including Tumblr^[5] and 4chan.^[6] On an unregistered date, a 9gag post titled "No Shit, Sherlock!" was submitted (shown below, left) which gathered over 32.000 points.^[2] On November 18th, 2011, FunnyJunk user bfresh submitted a post titled "No shit sherlock" which shows several text message based on a joke made by Jim Gaffigan (shown below, right). The post gathered over 29.700 views and 1.214 upvotes in 3 years.^[3]

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References