2000s

№ 051 萌え 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 № 049 炎上 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 № 028 黒歴史 kuro-rekishi “Dark history”: a word from a giant-robot anime that now appears in newspapers. Most people who use it have no idea. 2000s № 027 死亡フラグ shibō furagu “Death flag”: a programming term for the moment a character seals their own fate — like showing a photo of their sweetheart in a war movie. 2000s № 026 中二病 chūnibyō “Eighth-grader syndrome”: the imaginary illness of pretending you have hidden powers and a dark past. Symptoms peak at fourteen. 2000s № 025 リア充 riajū A word for people whose offline life is going well — coined, of course, by people online. 2000s № 024 草食系男子 sōshoku-kei danshi “Herbivore men” — a zoological label for men with no appetite for the chase. Foreign newspapers loved it. 2000s № 023 婚活 konkatsu “Marriage hunting” — a word that admitted, out loud, that marriage no longer just happens. 2000s № 022 ツンデレ tsundere Cold on the outside, melting on the inside. A fan-made word for a character type — now teaching Japanese to the world. 2000s № 021 イケメン ikemen The standard word for a handsome man — with two origin stories fused into its last syllable, and nobody needs to choose. 2000s № 009 ググる guguru Google, conjugated as a Japanese verb. The language has been doing this to foreign words for a century. 2000s № 008 写メ sha-me A word for phone photos, born in the country that put cameras in phones before almost anyone else. 2000s № 002 KY kē-wai Two roman letters. But they do not stand for English words. They stand for “cannot read the air.” 2000s