O RLY?
You might remember it as YA RLY, orly owl
Answered with YA RLY and NO WAI!!
Biggest memes ever27 of 32
2003·Early web, before YouTube
A photograph of a snowy owl with its beak open and its eyes wide, captioned O RLY? in block capitals.
At a glanceThe facts
- Remembered as
- YA RLY
- Spread in
- 2003
- Format
- Meme
- Photographed by
- John White, a nature photographer, who posted the picture to a Usenet newsgroup in 2001
- Who or what it shows
- A snowy owl, panting to cool off
- Used to say
- Oh, really? Said sarcastically to something obvious or untrue
- What it said
- Answered with YA RLY and NO WAI!!
- Origin
- No single original
- Available
- Not held by ViralWorld
What this wasThe story
A photograph of a snowy owl captioned O RLY?, from Something Awful and 4chan, with the replies YA RLY and NO WAI. One of the first image macros to become a conversational move rather than a joke.
Why it matteredWhat changed
A picture used purely as a reply. Posted under a claim nobody believed, it did the work of a sentence, and it came with its own set of answers.
What people misrememberSet straight
Commonly remembered asAn owl looking surprised or sceptical.
ActuallyWhite said the owl was panting to cool down, the way a dog does. The expression was read into it afterwards.1
What it createdWhat came out of it
- World of Warcraft has two auctioneers named O’Reely and Yarly.1
- Parodies of O’Reilly programming book covers borrow the name.1
More from hereIn this collection
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.
What this was built on, each one a record of its own.
- A variant of The image macroMeme · 2007
The snowy owl captioned O RLY is given as the classic example of an image macro.
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