About

Wurds refer to a series of image macros containing intentional typographical errors. While stock photos of food are most commonly used, pictures of animals, celebrities and various inanimate objects have been also captioned in a similar manner. Like the Berks and Didney Worl image macro series, the captions are meant to be read phonetically as if they were spoken with a speech impediment.

Origin

The series is rumored to have started on 4chan's /b/ (random) board as early as September 2010, but an archived thread has yet to be found. The earliest known thread^[1] dates back to December 17th, 2010, which began with a photo of a peach with the caption "peesh."

Precursor: Spaghatta Nadle

On February 19th, 2010, the webcomic blog Hyperbole and a Half^[9] published a comic titled "Spaghatta Nadle", which featured a noodle with a speech impediment referring to itself as "spaghatta nadle" while talking to a fork.

Spread

On September 10th, 2010, the Internet humor site Urlesque^[3] posted an article titled “We Dare You Not to Laugh at 31 Foods With Misspelled Names”, which included several examples of food stock photo image macros that were reportedly posted in a 4chan thread. On September 14th, the men's humor blog Gunaxin^[5] published a post titled "That Food Ain't Spelled Right", which compared the image macro captions to those used with LOLCat images. On September 19th, a compilation of examples was posted to the Internet humor site Expiration Chug.^[4] On November 17th, Redditor fyrie submitted a post titled “Yommy Fuud!” to the /r/pics^[8] subreddit, which included a large collection of 25 Wurds image macros. The post received over 1,600 up votes and 300 comments prior to being archived.

On December 2nd, FunnyJunk^[10] user theunsaltedpretzel submitted the same compilation image in a post titled "misspelled food."
On December 17th, 2010, the earliest archived 4chan^[1] thread was submitted to the /b/ (random) board, featuring more than 150 image macros written in the style of Wurds. On March 27th, 2011, Something Awful Forums^[2] member EvangeliKal-El posted several examples in a thread titled "PYF image macros/memes: gooby pls i can haz cheezeburger?"

On May 10th, the compilation image was resubmitted to Reddit^[7] in a post titled "This Picture Has Me Pronouncing Things in Ridiculous Ways Now." Within one year, the post received over 7,000 up votes and 780 comments.

Notable Examples

External References