Has your pre-teen child suddenly dropped the use of “Mom” or “Dad” in favor of calling you… “Bruh?” (As is the case for at least some of our editors).

While we can’t offer you compensation for the shock and confusion, we can provide an explanation of what “bruh” means and where it comes from in our latest Word of the Week.

Jamie Cohen, assistant professor of media studies at CUNY Queens College, and Amanda Brennan, known as the Internet Librarian, say we can thank social media for getting us to this point.

What was once another shortened way to call a friend “brother,” “bruh” is now being used by Gen Alpha to address parents, express sadness, frustration, happiness and seemingly everything under the sun.

“It’s punctuation. It is a sentence on its own that, depending on how you say it and who it’s said to, it can mean anything,” Brennan said.

It’s become ubiquitous thanks to TikTok, but the origins of this word, expression or what have you, go back as early as the 16th century.

Where did ‘bruh’ come from?

Over many hundreds of years, a number of words have emerged that abbreviate “brother” including “bro,” “bra” and now “bruh.” The earliest evidence of an abbreviated use of “brother” is with the word “bro,” used as early as the 16th century, said Jesse Sheidlower, former editor-at-large of the Oxford English Dictionary and an adjunct professor at Columbia University.

“Bro” usually came before “a man’s name or to a character, especially the name of an animal,” Sheidlower said. In African American folklore, we see “bro” being used in this way during the 19th century, especially in the Caribbean and Southern U.S., he said.

The first known use of the word “bruh” appeared much later, in the 1890s, according to Merriam Webster.

Back then it was being spelled “brer” and comes from the “Br’er Rabbit,” a series of stories by Joel Chandler Harris, an American journalist and folklorist who wrote these stories from the African American oral tradition, Sheidlower said.

The Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox characters are seen in the Splash Mountain attraction at Walt Disney World Resort’s Magic Kingdom on August 9, 2020, in Lake Buena Vista, Fla.

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How has internet culture brought us to “bruh”

For a long time, “bruh” was put aside in favor of “bro” or “bra” (as surfers liked to call each other).

The use of “bruh” is a perfect example of how internet culture and especially TikTok, have transformed how people talk to each other, according to Brennan, who used to work at Know Your Meme, a website dedicated to documenting internet phenomena.

“I think ‘bro’ and ‘bruh’ are great examples of how words evolve over time and take their meaning so far away from what it used to be,” Brennan explained.

Guests attend TikTok Presents Something Beautiful Album Release Event With Miley Cyrus at Chateau Marmont on May 27, 2025 in Los Angeles, California.

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“Bro” walked so “bruh” could run, essentially.

It really began with the age of the 2010s meme culture, a far simpler time in our internet’s history, when the use of “bro” became widespread. While “bro” can be used as a way to refer to a friend, the internet evolved its meaning to refer to a stereotypical frat boy and their style and culture as “bro culture,” Brennan said.

Brennan herself wrote the Know Your Meme page dedicated to explaining the use of “bro.”

Phrases and memes like “U Mad Bro?” became a sensation and so did “Come at me, bro” (from Jersey Shore fame). And then you have, “Don’t Tase me, bro!” a phrase plucked from a viral video of a University of Florida student begging security officers not to Tase him during a Q&A with then-U.S. Sen. John Kerry. (They Tased him anyway.)

A short-lived app called Vine, where users watched and posted 6 second long videos that played on a loop, brought us to “bruh,” according to Cohen, the media studies professor.

Twelve years ago high school basketball player Tony Farmer collapsed after hearing his sentence in criminal court for kidnapping, assaulting and robbing a former girlfriend. A creator on Vine used this clip and put the sound effect of someone saying “bruh” as Farmer collapsed. As far as we know, that is the origin of “bruh” on the Internet, Cohen said.

Why does “bruh” matter today?

“Bruh” is popular on TikTok as users have taken the word to launch into a story, express shock, or confusion, or even to address their parents or teachers, Brennan and Cohen said.

Cohen says young watchers of TikTok are taking “bruh” and running with it.

In this photo illustration, the TikTok app is seen on a phone on March 13, 2024 in New York City.

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“You could probably have a complete conversation with one word just based on how you use it. It can be despair or it could be excitement or it could be just a reference,” he said.

Brennan added, “But the meaning is defined by everything happening in the moment around it, and it is a temporal word where I could say it five times a day, and each time could be like a different meaning of a sentence and it’s just one sound.”

Brennan had some advice for parents grappling with this new turn of phrase.

“Don’t be afraid of the slang. Just zoom out and think about how words are all made up by people, even the ones that aren’t slang, and read your context clues.”

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Published June 25, 2025 1:00 AM PDT

When we were kids, summer was graced with the tang of saltwater and possibility, and the fading song of school’s final bell. But for many working adults these days, the season often just kind of feels … the same as the rest of the year. Except with, maybe, a few more bugs and a bit more sweat.

So perhaps our notion of a “beach read,” that quintessential artifact of the season, ought to evolve too. Sure, there will always be room for breezy books, but this week’s publishing highlights at least feel refreshingly different — if only because these books, filled as they are with historic firsts, complex lives and destructive loves, don’t promise too much escapist refreshment at all.

Consider them, instead, as windows on a complicated world that’s always with us, whatever the calendar may say.

@UGMan by Mark Sarvas

Don’t be fooled by the triumphalist lie trumpeted by those Billy Goats Gruff: The troll never really died, he just traded his underbridge lair for the less literal — and more insidious — darkness of social media. And he has a lot to catch you up on. In this disquieting novel, Sarvas’ third, a protagonist known better by his online handle (@UGMan, natch) allows readers into the barbed tangle of his thoughts in an multiform monologue that recalls the captivating obsessives created by the late great Thomas Bernhard.

I’ll Be Right Here: A Novel by Amy Bloom

Half a decade removed from her husband’s decision to pursue assisted suicide — an experience she chronicled in a devastating 2022 memoir, In Love — novelist Amy Bloom is returning to the comparative succor of fiction. Her latest novel weaves intimacies on an expansive loom of decades, following a found family of immigrants and sparkplug friends in New York City. The intergenerational saga, as reviewer Heller McAlpin notes for NPR, “once again showcases Bloom’s signature open-armed embrace of love in its many forms.”

Make It Ours: Crashing the Gates of Culture with Virgil Abloh by Robin Givhan

By the time Abloh died of cancer in 2021, the 41-year-old had ascended the commanding heights of the fashion world. Men’s creative director at Louis Vuitton, founder of a label repped by hip-hop’s household names – Off-White, IKEA collaborator and former architecture student, the renaissance man was many things — including, simply and perhaps most powerfully, a Black man. Givhan, a Pulitzer Prize-winning fashion critic, followed the trailblazing designer’s rise as it took shape; now, in a book that’s equal parts biography and essay, she is reflecting on a legacy that defied the limits of the runway.

Misbehaving at the Crossroads: Essays & Writings by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

A poet and professor whose work has been steeped in memoir and archive-plumbing biography, Jeffers made a monumental pivot to fiction with 2021’s centuries-spanning epic, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois. Though certainly a leap, her debut novel continued what has become something of a career-long project for her, foregrounding the stories of heroic Black women. Now, Jeffers is carrying that project forward in still another mode, turning to personal and political essays to reflect on the complicated — at times seemingly impossible — position that Black women like her occupy in a culture determined to reduce them to virtually anything but themselves.

Room on the Sea: Three Novellas by André Aciman

The author best known for Call Me By Your Name, the lush portrait of young same-sex love adapted into a beloved 2017 film, here presents a triptych of novellas rooted in the same sweetly painful intimacies. The three stories collected in Room on the Sea all concern the kinds of quiet, complex love that refuse to fit neatly on a greeting card. Swoonworthy though their settings may be, these relationships look less like the scenes on postcards than the images we catch in passing patinated mirrors.

Trailblazer: Perseverance in Life and Politics by Carol Moseley Braun

Moseley Braun, more than most, has heard her fair share of the word “first.” The politician made history as the first Black woman elected to the U.S. Senate, back in 1992, and later as the first Black woman to serve as ambassador to New Zealand. Yet, as glamorous as that word may be, the necessary flipside of “first” is the struggle that comes with occupying spaces that aren’t used to people who look and talk like you. In Moseley Braun’s memoir, she reflects on a life lived in the public eye, which in her words, “has always been an uphill climb.”