Waekjeo
TL;DR · Origin "왹져" (roughly "oekjyeo") is Korean Twitter slang meaning alien, derived from the meme account culture around Oesamo (외사모). The name originally stood for "Society of People W…
Origin
"왹져" (roughly "oekjyeo") is Korean Twitter slang meaning alien, derived from the meme account culture around Oesamo (외사모). The name originally stood for "Society of People Who Love Aliens," but the running joke is that none of the members actually loved aliens, so it was reinterpreted as "Society of People Who Hunt Aliens." Librewiki's entry cites a 2016 tweet from the Oesamo account (status ID 812325956572454912) as the source for the meme. In other words, this is not a word coined in 2024 — it is a 2016-era Twitter in-joke that stuck.
How it is used
It works in three ways:
- Noun — an alien, literally; within the Oesamo joke, the thing being hunted
- Extended noun — by extension, anyone incomprehensible or strange, and sometimes foreigners
- Interjection / verb — thrown out on its own as an exclamation, or inflected into forms like "왹져라"
Because it is an in-joke, it reads like a typo to outsiders, and "what does this even mean?" threads recur on Korean forums. The deliberately mangled spelling — made to look like alien speech — is the whole point of the word.
