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Harambe was a 17-year-old western lowland gorilla shot and killed at the Cincinnati Zoo on May 28, 2016, after a three-year-old boy fell into his enclosure. The incident spawned one of the defining memes of 2016, mixing ironic tributes, mock-serious mourning, and the viral rallying cry "Dicks Out for Harambe" into a sprawling internet event that outlasted every thinkpiece written about it.

Yeet is an exclamation and slang verb that exploded out of black social media culture in early 2014, first as a choreographed dance on Vine and YouTube before evolving into the internet's favorite word for throwing something with maximum force and zero concern. The word was voted the American Dialect Society's 2018 Slang/Informal Word of the Year and was added to Dictionary.com in 2021[2].

Blinking White Guy is a reaction GIF of Drew Scanlon, a video producer at gaming website Giant Bomb, doing a subtle double-take during a 2013 livestream. The clip sat dormant for years before exploding on Twitter in February 2017, becoming one of the most-used GIFs on the internet for expressing disbelief, confusion, or a polite "what the hell?"[3]. Scanlon later used his accidental fame to raise tens of thousands of dollars for multiple sclerosis research[4].

Big Chungus is a meme built around a screenshot of an overweight Bugs Bunny from the 1941 cartoon *Wabbit Twouble*, typically presented as a fake PlayStation 4 game cover. The meme went viral in December 2018 after a GameStop employee shared a story about a customer trying to buy the nonexistent game. It became one of the defining absurdist memes of late 2018 and eventually received official recognition from Warner Bros.

Grumpy Cat is the internet nickname for Tardar Sauce, a mixed-breed cat from Arizona whose permanently scowling face made her one of the most famous animals on the internet. First posted to Reddit in September 2012, her photos spawned thousands of image macros with cynical, deadpan captions and built a merchandising empire worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in licensing deals. Tardar Sauce died in May 2019 at age seven, but her grumpy face is still one of the most recognizable meme images ever created.

Distracted Boyfriend is a stock photo turned object labeling meme showing a man checking out another woman while his girlfriend looks on in disapproval. Taken by Barcelona photographer Antonio Guillem in mid-2015, the image first appeared as a meme in a Turkish Facebook group in January 2017 before going massively viral across Twitter, Reddit, and Instagram in August 2017. It won Meme of the Year at the 10th annual Shorty Awards and helped popularize the object labeling format that dominated meme culture in the late 2010s.

"Bruh" is a slang term derived from "brother" that became one of the internet's most versatile reaction expressions. Rooted in African American Vernacular English dating back to the 19th century, it exploded online in 2014 when a Vine video dubbed a deadpan "bruh" over footage of a basketball player collapsing in court. The word now functions as a one-syllable catch-all for disbelief, frustration, humor, and everything in between.

Nyan Cat is an 8-bit animated GIF of a cat with a cherry Pop-Tart body flying through space, trailing a rainbow, set to the endlessly looping Japanese Vocaloid song "Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya!" by daniwellP. Artist Christopher Torres created the animation during a Red Cross charity livestream on April 2, 2011; three days later YouTuber saraj00n paired it with the song, and the combination quickly became one of the biggest viral memes of the early 2010s. The original video pulled in over 205 million YouTube views and sparked games, merchandise, a Webby Award, and a landmark NFT sale worth nearly $600,000.