Etymology

duckroll

D2U1C3K5R1O1L1L1

Today it means: A bait-and-switch Internet prank involving the sharing of a link that leads to a picture of a duck on wheels instead of what is claimed. Full definition →

English roll ← Middle English doke ← Old English dū̆ce
Ask AI about its historyChatGPTClaudePerplexityGoogle AIGrok

The story

  1. Proto-Germanic*dūkaną
  2. Proto-West Germanic*dūkan
  3. Old Englishdū̆ce
  4. Middle Englishdoke
  5. Englishduck
  6. Englishroll
  7. English todayduckroll

From duck + roll. In 2006, Christopher "Moot" Poole implemented a wordfilter replacing egg with duck on 4chan, causing instances of eggroll on the site to become duckroll. This inspired an anonymous 4chan user to create an image macro featuring a duck with wheels edited onto its body and the caption "duckroll." The image was later used to prank 4chan users, who were lured into clicking what was presented as an interesting link, but instead lead to the "duckroll."

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.