REEEEEEE

2014catchphraseclassic

Published September 24, 2026

REEEEEEE is an onomatopoeic scream of rage that first appeared alongside Angry Pepe images on 4chan's /r9k/ board in December 2014, mimicking the shrill screaming noise real frogs make when threatened3. Within months it jumped to Reddit, spawned a subgenre of 'Fucking Normies!' audio parodies, and eventually got its own mobile game that Apple banned for featuring Pepe4.

pepefrustration memes4chan memescatchphrase memesreaction memes

Overview

REEEEEEE works as a written scream, usually stretched with as many E's as the poster feels like typing, and it almost always pairs with an Angry Pepe image or a bulging-veined green frog face3. The joke leans on the fact that the sound is real: several frog species produce a piercing shriek to startle predators, and the meme borrows that noise as shorthand for pure, wordless internet rage1. Because it started on /r9k/, it carries the flavor of that board's self-loathing outsider humor, and the target of the scream is almost always something mundane, another user, a repost, a 'normie,' a small inconvenience.

The expression is often confused with the Autistic Screeching meme, and Redditors on /r/OutOfTheLoop actually asked whether the two were the same thing back in early 20156. On Reddit and Imgur it also picked up a second life as a way to yell about duplicate posts, where 'REEEEE' functions as a compressed 'this is a repost'3. The tone can be genuinely angry or completely ironic, and part of the joke is that you can't tell which, since the poster has abandoned words for a frog shriek.

Origin & Background

Platform
4chan /r9k/ (origin), Reddit (viral spread)
Date
2014

Frogs really do scream. Wildlife groups like Froglife note that common frogs and toads produce a shrill distress cry when grabbed or threatened, and the earliest well-known video of this behavior was uploaded to YouTube by user ppparaone on October 25, 2009, later gaining millions of views2. That clip circulated for years on aggregator sites before anyone connected it to Pepe.

The onomatopoeic version, the actual 'REEEEEEE' text, first shows up in an archived 4chan /r9k/ post from December 27, 2014, where an Angry Pepe image was captioned with a long string of E's3. No individual creator is confirmed as the originator, since /r9k/ posts are anonymous by default. Within weeks, more Angry Pepe threads with the same scream were being posted on the board, and on January 31, 2015, one thread of Pepe vomiting drew replies of users recording themselves actually making the noise3.

How It Spread

The jump off /r9k/ happened fast. On February 21, 2015, a Redditor asked on /r/OutOfTheLoop why people on 4chan were suddenly saying 'REEEEEE,' and user Dragon___ answered that the sound resembled the shrieks associated with autistic people, which is where the mixup with the Autistic Screeching meme comes from3. A second /r/OutOfTheLoop thread on March 19, 2015 asked the same question again, showing the term had still not fully clicked for outsiders a month later3.

The biggest offshoot was the 'Fucking Normies! REEEEEEE!' audio format. YouTuber GoldenSodaXbox uploaded one of the early recorded rants on February 1, 20155, and later that month YouTuber The Dank Memester compiled several clips into a video titled 'NORMIES GET OUT'7. These audio clips gave the written scream an actual voice, and remix videos followed.

By 2017 the meme was mainstream enough to inspire a product. On June 4, 2017, Spirit Realm Games released a gameplay trailer for Pepe Scream, a Flappy Bird-style mobile game where players yell 'REEEEE!' into their microphone to make Pepe fly8. Apple rejected the app from the App Store for containing Pepe imagery, which the company classified as 'objectionable content,' and Motherboard confirmed the rejection notice in an interview with the developers on June 9, 20174. The developers told Motherboard the game was directly inspired by 'memes featuring Pepe screaming REEEEE'4.

How to Use This Meme

Typical usage is a single line, all caps, with the number of E's scaled to how mad the poster is pretending to be. Common convention is to pair it with an Angry Pepe reaction image, a screaming frog photo, or nothing at all. On Reddit and Imgur it often shows up as a one-word reply meaning 'this is a repost.' The scream can be sincere frustration, but more often it's ironic, with the joke being that the poster has stopped forming words.

Frequently Asked Questions