No Chill

Confirmed 114,378

Part of a series on Black Twitter. [View Related Entries]

About

No Chill is a phrase which denotes that someone is acting irrationally. The phrase is often paired with images to describe humorous or irrational behavior, or used to describe Vines or other video media of people acting strangely.

Origin

The exact origin of No Chill is unknown but the phrase began appearing in this context online in 2013, when it was first defined on Urban Dictionary as "At this particular moment you’re being extremely reckless, as in That negro PJ has no chill the way he was talking about Brian's girl last night right in front of him."[sic]. This definition remains the top definition, with 730 upvotes and 231 downvotes between April 15th, 2013 and August 29th, 2015.^[1]

Spread

No Chill is in thorough and widespread use as a hashtag and post title within the community known as Black Twitter. It is applied as a title to hundreds of posts within one of the main forums for this community, /r/blackpeopletwitter, 39 of which have more than 1000 upvotes.^[2] During the month of August 2014, it was used both as a hashtag and as a phrase on Twitter more than 840,000 times and as of August 29th, 2015, the hashtag has been used more than 1.85 million times on Instagram.^[3]^[4] There are over 92,000 videos using the phrase as either a title or a hashtag on Vine.^[5]

On July 17th, 2015, Skrillex and Vic Mensa premiered a song on the Beats 1 network entitled "No Chill," where it received 2319 loves and 257 shares.^[6] In addition the song was later posted on YouTube, where it received more than 10,000 plays.