Today I Learned (TIL)

Submission 33,324

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About

Today I Learned, often shortened as TIL, is an online expression typically used in the title of a post or discussion thread when introducing an interesting fact or trivia that had been previously unknown to the poster, in a similar vein to the phrase "did you know?"

Origin

While the exact origin of "TIL" as the three-letter acronym for "today I learned…" remains unclear, the phrase itself most likely began seeping into everyday online vernacular through its usage on social news aggregation sites Reddit and Digg sometime in April 2007, according to Google Trends. On December 28th, 2008, Redditor nix0n created /r/TIL^[1], a subreddit where community members are encouraged to spontaneously share "interesting and specific facts" that they had just found out about, in contrast to general knowledge that they had intently looked up.

Spread

On August 20th, 2009, Urban Dictionary user zBriGuy submitted the earliest known acronymic definition for "TIL" (shown below).^[2]

In February 2010, the official Twitter feed^[8] for the /r/TIL subreddit was set up, followed by the launch of the Tumblr blog^[4] in June 2012 and the official Facebook page^[7] in August that same year. In mid-May 2011, the moderators of /r/TIL announced that the acronym "TIL" would be phased out in favor of the phrase "todayilearned" for the name of the subreddit.^[10]

Examples

As of January 2016, the /r/todayilearned subreddit commands nearly 10 million subscribers and there are a total of seven /r/todayilearned posts that have accrued more than 10,000 upvotes.