Netflix and chill
You might remember it as Netflix and chill invitation
The first recorded use, in January 2009: “I’m about to log onto Netflix and chill for the rest of the night.”
2015·The platform era·funny
A phrase that first meant staying in to watch television, and came to mean an invitation to sex.
At a glanceThe facts
- Remembered as
- Netflix and chill invitation
- Spread in
- 2015
- Format
- Phrase
- What it said
- The first recorded use, in January 2009: “I’m about to log onto Netflix and chill for the rest of the night.”
- Origin
- No single original
- Available
- Not held by ViralWorld
What this wasThe story
The phrase was recorded on Twitter as early as 2009 meaning exactly what it says: watch something, relax. Over the following years it acquired a euphemistic second meaning, and by 2015 the innocent reading was no longer available to anybody under thirty. The joke is the impossibility of using it sincerely.
It is the best-documented example of the internet capturing a phrase and changing what it can mean. It was also a genuine problem for the company named in it, which had to decide whether to acknowledge a euphemism built out of its own brand — and eventually did, which is its own small landmark in how corporations learned to speak online.
The phrase reached the point of parody within a year — a Netflix and Chill festival, a papal invitation joke, a Guardian explainer, a Vice how-to — which is the reliable sign that a piece of slang has finished. It survives now as a period marker for the mid-2010s.
TimelineIn order
- Made
The first recorded tweet with the words, meaning exactly what it says.1
- Took off
The second meaning is believed to appear in the middle of the year and spreads through Black Twitter by the end of it.1
- Later
Urban Dictionary adds the sexual definition.1
- Mainstream
Netflix publishes a “Netflix and chill study”.1
What people misrememberSet straight
Commonly remembered asIt always meant sex.
ActuallyIn 2009 it meant watching Netflix. The other meaning is dated to 2014.1
Why it is here: something the internet still knows by name · copied, redrawn and reused until the original stopped mattering · it got out of its own corner of the internet fast · still being watched and quoted years later
Where it came fromWhat we know
This spread through many posts rather than one identifiable original. The example shown is one surviving copy and is not claimed as the first.
Nothing here is claimed to be the first version of this. It spread through many posts rather than from one identifiable original.
Not established. This index only names a creator where the evidence supports it.
SourcesWhat was read
Sources last read on . That date is about the history on this page. Whether the media still plays is checked separately and can change any day. How ViralWorld documents things