This Is Snek

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About

This Is Snek refers to a phrase used as a caption of a photo of a Indian woman holding a giant snake. The phrase is used as a hashtag or to caption other humorous photos of snakes.

Origin

The exact origin of the photo is unknown, although it began to pop up online on various photo blogs during the winter of 2013-2014.^[1] The caption, an unrelated quote by Indian singer Dharmendra Rada, appeared on the photo during this time as well, and it's likely that the combination was first created on 4chan, although it hasn't been archived. The first instance of the photo posted online was on FunnyJunk on January 24th, 2014.^[2]

Precursor

The word "snek" in reference to snake predates the "This Is Snek" image by several years. The word snek has been archived on 4chan almost 10,000 times, and the first instances of the word snek being used to reference a snake date back to at least 2012.^[3] According to Urban Dictionary, snek is often paired with the word "stahp," as in "Snek Stahp!" in the image below.^[4] In addition, snek is often used as a hashtag on Tumblr, where many use it to tag photos of their own snakes, and Instagram, where there are more than 12,000 posts doing the same.^[5]^[6]

Spread

The first known reddit post of This is Snek, to the subreddit /r/nottimanderic, was February 10th, 2015 and received 1691 upvotes as of September 2015.^[7] This post, in turn, inspired the subreddit /r/sneks, which has gained over 11,000 readers in the same time span.^[8] The image phrase has been used over 750 times on 4chan, the first of which was May 19th, 2014 on the /s4s/ board.^[9] On November 26th, 2014, the image was posted to reddit again, this time in the /r/indianpeoplefacebook subreddit, where it received 2,888 points (100% upvoted).^[10]

There are thousands of snake-related results at any given time for "This Is Snek" on Tumblr,^[11] and the hashtag #thisissnek produces a variety of results on Instagram and Twitter.^[12]^[13] There are 24 deviations on DeviantArt.^[14]