About

Smol (often paired with lorge or bean), is an Internet slang term used to describe any animal, character, or object that is considered very tiny and cute; most commonly with small birds. Since its emergence in mid-2015, the term has been used as a common descriptor or hashtag on major social network platforms.

Origin

The origin of smol is currently unknown, but it began appearing on social networks sometime between the late spring and early summer of 2015. An article on Buzzfeed used the term for the title of a list of small animals on May 8th, 2015,^[8] but it's likely that the origin of the term's popularity was a fan reference to a musician named Tyler Josephs from the American musical group Twenty One Pilots. Fans began referring to Josephs as a "smol bean" on Tumblr and Twitter.^[1] On June 26th, 2015, Josephs responded, "I am a bean."^[2] The tweet received over 22,000 retweets and 33,00 favorites over the next two months, with many fans responding "A smol bean."

Spread

The term is widely used on a number of major social network platforms. The word was first defined on Urban Dictionary on June 6th, 2015,^[3]and the Tumblr blog MemeDocumentation first wrote about the word on June 29th, 2015, identifying that the word “Lorge” was frequently used in conjunction.^[4] On Tumblr, a search query for "smol" returns thousands of posts.^[5] According to Topsy analytics, the word "smol" has been used on Twitter more than 111,000 times between August 23rd and September 22nd, 2015; however, these numbers do not necessarily represent the scale of its usage as an internet slang term since the word has other meanings in other languages, most prominently in Serbian.^[6][7] On Vine, there are nearly 3,000 posts associated with the term, many of which feature clips of boy bands like One Direction and videos of pets and other animals.^[8] In addition, the word is also employed on fan art, especially on art relating to Steven Universe and Homestuck. There are over 8,600 results on DeviantAr of drawings tagged with the term smol.^[9]

Search Interest

Note: The Google Trends chart reflects search interest for 'smol' in various contexts, including its usage as a surname and a common word in other languages.

External References