greentext

plural greentexts

1. countableA short anecdote posted on 4chan, typically written in all lowercase, in present tense, using the imperative mood without an explicit subject, and often dealing with social ineptness. Each line is usually concise and begins with >.
2. uncountableThis format or type of text in general.

   These are anecdotes written in short, concise sentences that use the 4chan platform's 'greentext' formatting code, which is a function built into the site's forum software that renders any text preceded by an angled, right-facing bracket green in colour.

   2021 January 14, Lawrence May, Digital Zombies, Undead Stories: Narrative Emergence and Videogames, Bloomsbury Publishing USA, →ISBN, page 208

   3 more examples

   Thus, we have not covered patterns that were just emerging as we finished our manuscript, such as the discussion of urban legends and misinformation in the Ask Reddit section of reddit^([sic]), the greentext stories on 4chan, or the numerous references to urban legends on Bustle.

   2019 August 12, William Aspray, James W. Cortada, From Urban Legends to Political Fact-Checking: Online Scrutiny in America, 1990-2015, Springer, →ISBN, page 78

   We next see our protagonist surrounded by what is known as greentext. Greentext is a storytelling format told in the present tense and makes heavy use of self-deprecation and pronoun-dropping language. The stories are usually given additional tonal cues through accompaniment with a Pepe or Wojak meme.

   2020 February 20, Brian Feldman, “The New 1975 Music Video is A Six Minute Crash Course in Memes”, in Intelligencer, New York, N.Y.: New York Media, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 21 Feb 2020

   Voicing contempt for the human lives that may have been lost, six responses on the thread react to this tweet in a similar fashion: with images of laughing, or with 4chan greentext that uses the > character to express sarcasm and contempt in the form of mock sympathy for those lost or displaced in the shipwreck.

   2022 September 23, Donna M. Goldstein, Kristen Drybread, Corruption and Illiberal Politics in the Trump Era, Taylor & Francis, →ISBN