About

"Oh, Worm?" is a misspelling of "Oh, Word?" After appearing in an advice animal where "Oh, Word?" is a common caption, it began to grow popular on Tumblr in the first half of 2017.

Origin

The slang first appeared on the advice animal Lil D-Wade, a school photo of basketball player Dwayne Wade. Due to the doubtful face on Wade's face, a common caption for the photo was "Oh, word?" Several versions made in the template had a typo which read "Oh, worm?"^[1] (example shown below).

Gwynndolin first posted this image to Tumblr on September 19th, 2016.^[8] The post became a Tumblr meme following posts by user 6thhouse on November 9th^[2] and November 10th, 2016^[3] in which he obsessed over the phrase (shown below). The second gained over 16,000 points.

Spread

The text meme spread slowly through Tumblr through the first half of 2017. Interest began picking up around spring and summer when a few popular text posts began circulating. On June 8th, 2017, Tumblr user beatsallovertheshop^[4] posted a text post that read "a medieval peasant, upon seeing a dragon: oh, wyrm?", which gained over 20,000 notes (reblogged version shown below, left). On July 27th, birdfriender^[5] wrote a text post that read "Literally how does “oh worm?” express every possible human emotion," gaining over 14,000 notes (shown below, right)

The meme's origins have been a point of research for meme-researching communities for some time. On June 8th, 2017, a post was submitted to /r/OutOfTheLoop^[6] inquiring about the origins. After being tagged in posts inquiring about the origins of the phrase, Meme Documentation ^[7] posted an explainer on August 3rd, 2017.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References