The Japanese Buzzword Museum

ぼっち

Featured exhibit — № 035

botchi

noun · from ひとりぼっち (“all alone”) · 2010s

A clipped word for being alone that slowly stopped being sad. It may descend from a word for a monk.

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Walk the corridor — decades of words
1970s 1 words 1980s 5 words 1990s 6 words 2000s 13 words 2010s 11 words 2020s 15 words
Most visited exhibits
1 dopa-gaki 2020s 2 shabai 2020s 3 niowase 2020s 4 kaeru-ka genshō 2020s 5 kaiwai 2020s

From the permanent collection

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№ 051 moe A word for plants putting out new shoots, taken up to name a feeling toward drawn characters. Where it came from is still argued: a typing error, or a girl named Moe. 2000s № 050 tsundoku A pun about books bought and never opened, in print since the 1800s. English has no word of its own for the habit, so it borrowed this one. 2020s № 049 enjō The word for a building going up in flames, given to a post that has drawn a crowd of critics. Everything that follows — fuel, spread, extinguishing — stays inside the same fire. 2000s № 048 shabai A delinquents’ put-down from the 1980s, left for dead — dug up and worn again by kids who never met the first users. 2020s № 047 kōbun A dry grammar-class word — “sentence pattern” — became slang the moment a generation started collecting the way people talk, like specimens. 2020s № 046 chiru A borrowed English word for taking it easy — with which a busy generation gave a name to the unhurried mood itself. 2020s № 045 dopa-gaki “Dopamine brat”: what a generation raised on the endless scroll calls itself — and sometimes each other. Half confession, half jab. 2020s № 044 kaeru-ka genshō “Frog-ification”: a psychology term from a Grimm fairy tale, adopted by a generation — who changed its meaning almost completely on the way. 2020s № 043 kaiwai An old word for “neighborhood” that moved onto the internet — where the neighborhoods have no streets, only shared obsessions. 2020s