''uwu'' (), also stylized ''UwU'', is an

emoticon An emoticon (, , rarely , ), short for "emotion icon", also known simply as an emote, is a pictorial representation of a facial expression using Character (symbol), characters—usually punctuation marks, numbers, and letters—to express a ...

representing a

cute Cuteness is a subjective term describing a type of attractiveness commonly associated with youth and appearance, as well as a scientific concept and analytical model in ethology, first introduced by Konrad Lorenz. Lorenz proposed the concept ...

face. The ''u'' characters represent closed eyes, while the ''w'' represents a mouth. It is used to express various warm, happy, or affectionate feelings.

Usage and variants

The emoticon ''uwu'' is often used to denote cuteness (''

kawaii ''Kawaii'' is the culture of cuteness in Japan. It can refer to items, humans and non-humans that are charming, vulnerable, shy and childlike.Kerr, Hui-Ying (23 November 2016)"What is kawaii – and why did the world fall for the ‘cult of cu ...

''), happiness, or tenderness. Excessive usage of the emoticon can also have the intended effect of annoying its recipient. It is popularly used in the

furry fandom The furry fandom is a subculture interested in anthropomorphic animal characters. Examples of anthropomorphic attributes include exhibiting human intelligence and facial expressions, speaking, walking on two legs, and wearing clothes. The term ...

. It is often erroneously used to reference Japanese

otaku is a Japanese word that describes people with consuming interests, particularly in anime, manga, video games, or computers. Its contemporary use originated with a 1983 essay by Akio Nakamori in ''Manga Burikko''. may be used as a pejorativ ...

culture, despite not being of Japanese origin and

Japanese phonology The phonology of Japanese features about 15 consonant phonemes, the cross-linguistically typical five-vowel system of , and a relatively simple phonotactic distribution of phonemes allowing few consonant clusters. It is traditionally described ...

lacking a "wu" sequence entirely. The emoticon also has a more surprised and sometimes allusive variant, ''owo'' (also stylized ''OwO''; ; also associated with the furry fandom and often the response "what's this?") that may also denote cuteness, as well as curiosity and perplexion. ''owo'' gained popularity in 2018; as opposed to ''uwu'', the ''o'' characters represent open eyes. It is also sometimes used for

trolling In slang, a troll is a person who posts or makes inflammatory, insincere, digressive, extraneous, or off-topic messages online (such as in social media, a newsgroup, a forum, a chat room, a online video game), or in real life, with the int ...

. Another variant, ''TwT'', is often used to symbolize crying.

History

The emoticon ''uwu'' is known to date back as far as April 11, 2000, when it was used by furry artist Ghislain Deslierres in a post on the furry art site VCL (Vixen Controlled Library). A 2005

anime is Traditional animation, hand-drawn and computer animation, computer-generated animation originating from Japan. Outside of Japan and in English, ''anime'' refers specifically to animation produced in Japan. However, in Japan and in Japane ...

fanfiction Fan fiction or fanfiction (also abbreviated to fan fic, fanfic, fic or FF) is fictional writing written in an amateur capacity by fans, unauthorized by, but based on an existing work of fiction. The author uses copyrighted characters, settin ...

contained another early use of the word. The origin of the term is unknown, with many people believing it to originate in Internet chat rooms. By 2014, the emoticon had spread across the Internet into

Tumblr Tumblr (stylized as tumblr; pronounced "tumbler") is an American microblogging and social networking website founded by David Karp in 2007 and currently owned by Automattic. The service allows users to post multimedia and other content to a sho ...

, becoming an Internet subculture. The word ''uwu'' is included in the

Royal Spanish Academy The Royal Spanish Academy ( es, Real Academia Española, generally abbreviated as RAE) is Spain's official royal institution with a mission to ensure the stability of the Spanish language. It is based in Madrid, Spain, and is affiliated with ...

's word observatory, defined as an "emoticon used to show happiness or tenderness".

Notable uses

In 2018, the official

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

account tweeted "uwu" in response to a tweet by an artist. In 2020, the

U.S. Army Esports U.S. Army Esports is an esports team sponsored by the United States Army. The team, which consists of active duty and reserve personnel, was announced in November 2018 as a public outreach initiative operating within the Fort Knox, Kentucky-based ...

Twitter account tweeted "uwu" in reply to a tweet by

Discord Discord is a VoIP and instant messaging social platform. Users have the ability to communicate with voice calls, video calls, text messaging, media and files in private chats or as part of communities called "servers".The developer documenta ...

, which was met by significant backlash from Twitter users. This event culminated in a trend of attempting to get banned from the U.S. Army Esports Discord server as quickly as possible, with a common technique being to link to the Wikipedia article on

war crimes committed by the United States United States war crimes are violations of the law of war committed by members of the United States Armed Forces after the signing of the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 and the Geneva Conventions. The United States prosecutes offenders throu ...

Notes

References

External links