An edgelord is someone, typically on the Internet, who tries to impress or shock by posting exaggerated opinions such as nihilism or extremist views. [1] [2] [3] [4]
According to the Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary , the first known usage with this meaning was in 2015. [1] It was added to Webster's in September 2023. [1] Webster gave the following example:
We decided to watch It's A Wonderful Life and my dad said, "Every year I wait for Jimmy Stewart to jump off that bridge but he never does it"—merry Xmas from the original edgelord. [5]
Edgelords were characterised by author and journalist Rachel Monroe in her account of criminal behaviour, Savage Appetites:
...internet cynics lumped the online Nazis together with the serial killer fetishists and the dumbest goths and dismissed them all as edgelords: kids who tried to be scary online. I thought of most of these edgelords as basement-dwellers, pale faces lit by the glow of their computer screen, puffing themselves up with nihilism. An edgelord was a scrawny guy with a LARP-y vibe, possibly wearing a cloak, dreaming of omnipotence. Or a girl with excessive eyeliner and lots of Tumblr posts about self-harm. The disturbing content posted by edgelords was undermined by its predictability... [6]
It is frequently associated with the forum site 4chan. [7] [8] [9] The renegade rhetoric of the edgelord is often intentionally used by the far-right to troll leftist targets. [3]
