Dril

2008novelty Twitter accountclassic

Dril is a pseudonymous Twitter account that posts absurdist, misspelled short-form comedy and is widely credited as the central figure of Weird Twitter. The account started on September 15, 2008 and grew into one of the most influential comedy voices online, eventually publishing a 420-page book of collected tweets in 20181.

twitter memesabsurdist humor memesmisspelling memesironic memessomething awful memes

Overview

Dril is a pseudonymous Twitter account, also known as wint, that posts short bursts of misspelled, unpunctuated, seemingly nonsensical text that fans treat as high comedy. The profile is instantly identifiable: a blurry black-and-white crop of actor Jack Nicholson as the avatar, plus a link out to the personal site wint.co2. The tweets read like dispatches from a broken, confident, deeply online guy who is furious about everything and proud of nothing in particular.

The account is treated as the central figure of Weird Twitter, a loose group of users who write in sloppy, poetic, first-person voice for comedic effect3. Vice called Dril the "inscrutable hermit king of Weird Twitter" and credited him with coining the term "corncobbed" and opening up online talk about economics in his own bent way2. His voice bled into the way people joke on the internet, and specific lines from his feed still get quoted straight, unedited, years after the fact.

What makes Dril recognizable is not any single format but a texture: capital letters in the wrong places, quote marks around random nouns, weird brand loyalty, and an unshakable belief that the poster is right about a subject he clearly does not understand. That house style, mostly built inside a 140-character box, became the reference point for a whole generation of shitposters.

How It Spread

Dril was picked up early by comedy blogs and Twitter-of-the-week roundups. The entertainment site Head of Rothchild inducted him into its Twitter hall of fame on October 19, 2011, and outlets including Mashable5 and Complex ran him in their best-of-Twitter lists in 20124. Around the same period, tweets from the account started showing up as screenshots on Tumblr, including on the Twitter: The Comic blog, which pulled hundreds and then thousands of notes for individual Dril posts6.

Growth got steep from 2013 onward. A Daily Dot writeup in October 2012 pegged the follower count at only around 23,000, and by early 2014 the account had cleared 4,000 tweets and roughly 95,000 followers6. By the time Vice interviewed the person behind the account in 2018, that number was north of one million, and the AV Club had called it "the most iconic Twitter account in the history of social media"2. Individual posts routinely pulled thousands of retweets and favorites, and one July 28, 2013 tweet in particular racked up over 6,800 favorites and 6,200 retweets within the first months6.

A Buzzfeed oral history of Weird Twitter, published as the scene was being defined publicly, positioned Dril inside a small, tight social circle of posters whose sloppy style was already leaking into mainstream Twitter comedy3. From there the influence spread outward: single-topic Tumblr blogs like Dril Pencils, Drilcomics, and Metal Dril Solid started dropping his lines into unrelated comic panels6. On August 23, 2018, Dril announced the release of Mr. Ten Years, a 420-page book of over 1,500 selected tweets and more than 70 illustrations, and the announcement post pulled 1,900 retweets and 10,000 likes within a day1.

How to Use This Meme

There is no template to fill in with Dril, which is part of why the style is hard to imitate cleanly. People writing in a Dril voice typically use short, declarative sentences with intentionally bad capitalization and punctuation, random quote marks around ordinary nouns, and a narrator who is loudly confident about something small or wrong3. Common conventions include self-owns played straight, weirdly specific brand or product references, and a refusal to acknowledge context, so the tweet reads like the middle of a fight the reader was not invited to. Fans also just quote Dril lines directly into unrelated comment threads, which is how many of the tweets moved out of Twitter and into general online slang2.

Frequently Asked Questions

Dril

2008novelty Twitter accountclassic

Dril is a pseudonymous Twitter account that posts absurdist, misspelled short-form comedy and is widely credited as the central figure of Weird Twitter. The account started on September 15, 2008 and grew into one of the most influential comedy voices online, eventually publishing a 420-page book of collected tweets in 20181.

twitter memes absurdist humor memes misspelling memes ironic memes something awful memes

Overview

Dril is a pseudonymous Twitter account, also known as wint, that posts short bursts of misspelled, unpunctuated, seemingly nonsensical text that fans treat as high comedy. The profile is instantly identifiable: a blurry black-and-white crop of actor Jack Nicholson as the avatar, plus a link out to the personal site wint.co2. The tweets read like dispatches from a broken, confident, deeply online guy who is furious about everything and proud of nothing in particular.

The account is treated as the central figure of Weird Twitter, a loose group of users who write in sloppy, poetic, first-person voice for comedic effect3. Vice called Dril the "inscrutable hermit king of Weird Twitter" and credited him with coining the term "corncobbed" and opening up online talk about economics in his own bent way2. His voice bled into the way people joke on the internet, and specific lines from his feed still get quoted straight, unedited, years after the fact.

What makes Dril recognizable is not any single format but a texture: capital letters in the wrong places, quote marks around random nouns, weird brand loyalty, and an unshakable belief that the poster is right about a subject he clearly does not understand. That house style, mostly built inside a 140-character box, became the reference point for a whole generation of shitposters.

How It Spread

Dril was picked up early by comedy blogs and Twitter-of-the-week roundups. The entertainment site Head of Rothchild inducted him into its Twitter hall of fame on October 19, 2011, and outlets including Mashable5 and Complex ran him in their best-of-Twitter lists in 20124. Around the same period, tweets from the account started showing up as screenshots on Tumblr, including on the Twitter: The Comic blog, which pulled hundreds and then thousands of notes for individual Dril posts6.

Growth got steep from 2013 onward. A Daily Dot writeup in October 2012 pegged the follower count at only around 23,000, and by early 2014 the account had cleared 4,000 tweets and roughly 95,000 followers6. By the time Vice interviewed the person behind the account in 2018, that number was north of one million, and the AV Club had called it "the most iconic Twitter account in the history of social media"2. Individual posts routinely pulled thousands of retweets and favorites, and one July 28, 2013 tweet in particular racked up over 6,800 favorites and 6,200 retweets within the first months6.

A Buzzfeed oral history of Weird Twitter, published as the scene was being defined publicly, positioned Dril inside a small, tight social circle of posters whose sloppy style was already leaking into mainstream Twitter comedy3. From there the influence spread outward: single-topic Tumblr blogs like Dril Pencils, Drilcomics, and Metal Dril Solid started dropping his lines into unrelated comic panels6. On August 23, 2018, Dril announced the release of Mr. Ten Years, a 420-page book of over 1,500 selected tweets and more than 70 illustrations, and the announcement post pulled 1,900 retweets and 10,000 likes within a day1.

How to Use This Meme

There is no template to fill in with Dril, which is part of why the style is hard to imitate cleanly. People writing in a Dril voice typically use short, declarative sentences with intentionally bad capitalization and punctuation, random quote marks around ordinary nouns, and a narrator who is loudly confident about something small or wrong3. Common conventions include self-owns played straight, weirdly specific brand or product references, and a refusal to acknowledge context, so the tweet reads like the middle of a fight the reader was not invited to. Fans also just quote Dril lines directly into unrelated comment threads, which is how many of the tweets moved out of Twitter and into general online slang2.

Frequently Asked Questions