O RLY?

Origin

"O RLY?" is shorthand for "Oh, really?", a sarcastic comeback to an obvious or dubious statement. It is best known as an image macro: a wide-eyed snowy owl with "O RLY?" in large white Impact text underneath.

The phrase and the photo were born separately. The photo is a snowy owl taken by nature photographer John White and posted to the Usenet newsgroup alt.binaries.pictures.animals on February 17, 2001. According to White, the owl looks startled because it was panting to cool off, like a dog. As for the phrase, the earliest documented use is an August 20, 2003 post on the Something Awful forums by user Fantastipotamus: "o rly? Best essay ever." On October 20, 2004, a macro pairing it with Jack Bauer was posted to YTMND, to little response.

Spread

The two first met on 4chan in spring 2005, when the phrase was attached to White's owl photo, and the bird's incredulous look fit the words so well that it spread explosively. When a 4chan moderator added a wordfilter that replaced every "repost" with "owl," users responded by flooding the site with owl macros reading "every day is owl day." Search interest peaked between late 2005 and early 2006 and then gradually declined. YTMND collected hundreds of animated GIFs built on the owl. As unauthorized use of the photo grew, White sent out a number of cease-and-desist letters.

Variations and Spin-offs

Other snowy owl photos formed a set for continuing the exchange: "YA RLY" (yeah, really), "NO WAI!!" (no way), "NO RLY" (not really), "SURREALY," "QUITE RLY" and so on. World of Warcraft includes auctioneer NPCs named O'Reely and Yarly, and the animal covers of programming publisher O'Reilly were parodied as fake "O RLY?" book covers.

The meme even became malware. In May 2006 security firm Sophos found "W32/Hoots-A," a worm that, once it infected a Windows PC, sent the "O RLY?" owl picture to print queues. Written in Visual Basic, it spread through network shares and had the network paths of about 40 printers hardcoded into it. Sophos's Graham Cluley said it was not the work of a professional virus writer, pointing out that it wasn't even packed, and it appeared to have been written for a specific organization by someone with inside knowledge of its IT setup.

Usage

• Replying "O RLY?" when someone presents a blindingly obvious fact as a big discovery
• A sarcastic response to a plainly false claim
• Owl-image ping-pong: "O RLY?" answered with "YA RLY," then "NO WAI"

Sources

• Know Your Meme, "O RLY?" — the February 17, 2001 Usenet photo post, first Something Awful use on August 20, 2003, the 2004 YTMND Jack Bauer macro, the spring 2005 4chan pairing, the repost-to-owl wordfilter, peak search interest, variation list, cease-and-desist letters
• Wikipedia, "O RLY?" — White's explanation that the owl was panting to cool off, variations such as "NO RLY," the World of Warcraft NPCs, the O'Reilly cover parodies
• iTnews, "New worm hoots at users" (May 11, 2006) — how W32/Hoots-A behaved and spread, the roughly 40 printer paths, Graham Cluley's comments