About

Short King is a slang term used online to positively and affectionately describe a male who is short in height, typically 5'9" or less though sometimes disputed with 5'8"-5'10" being the cut-off point, but makes up for their stature by acting more masculine or being attractive. The meme phrase expanding on King can be seen as a counter to the Manlet slang term, though Manlet is typically used when referring to anyone below 6', leaving some in flux as a Manlet but not a Short King.

Origin

On July 26th, 2018, YouTubers Cody Ko and Noel Miller^[1] uploaded a video to Noel's channel called "Noel Miller Presents" in which they played the Love Island game. During the video, the two explicitly said and called out "Short Kings," purposely picking the male character who appeared to be 5'8" in height. The video received 9 million views in four years and is one of the first recorded instances of the usage of Short King as a slang term (shown below).

On October 17th, 2018, an Urban Dictionary entry was made for Short King by the user mnema geoff,^[2] which explicitly references Cody Ko and Noel Miller as the originators of the trend (shown below).

Spread

The term began to proliferate on social media sites, most notably Twitter, throughout much of 2019, with one of the most prominent examples of it being the post by Twitter user^[3] @Lizz, who made a post about her 5'5" king husband on December 13th, 2019, earning over 217,000 likes in three years (shown below).

The YouTuber MoistCritikal has often been called a Short King due to his 5'6" stature, which was the subject of many memes and videos about his height in the early 2020s. One such example was uploaded to YouTube^[4] on December 16th, 2020, by Clipy Clips with CodeMiko and Cr1tikal discussing his height and her having a humorous reaction (shown below). The video received over 81,000 views and 3,600 likes in roughly one year.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References