Behold a Square

About

Behold a Square refers to discourse and mathematics jokes or memes about an image showing a "square" with four sides of equal length and four right angles, technically fitting the definition of the geometric shape. The keyhole-shaped appearance of the image sparked parodies and redraws in early October 2024 on X / Twitter as it spread online.

Origin

On September 28th, 2024 Reddit^[4] user All_The_Clovers posted the earliest known version of the Behold a Square meme, showing a keyhole shape paired with the text, "Behold a square. A shape with four sides of equal length, with four right angles." The post (seen below) amassed more than 25,000 upvotes and 473 comments in five months.

Spread

On October 5th, 2024, the X^[1] page @The4thWayYT uploaded the image of a keyhole shape paired with the text, "Behold a square. A shape with four sides of equal length, with four right angles." The post (seen below) amassed over 10 million views and 281,000 likes in three days.

The image posted by @The4thWayYT went viral over the following days, inspiring redraw memes and discussions about the legitimacy of the shape being an actual "square."

For example, on October 6th, 2024, X^[2] user @poondonkus posted a redraw of the X-Men character Cyclops as the square-shaped illustration, writing "Behold Optic Blast." The tweet (seen below) received roughly 36,000 likes and 3,300 reposts in a day.

On the same day, October 6th, X^[3] user posted a version of the image with the recaption text, "Behold a Kamehameha," which garnered roughly 11 likes and three reposts in a day (shown below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References