"fail whale" meaning in English

See fail whale in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Audio: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-fail whale.wav Forms: fail whales [plural]
Etymology: The fail whale originated on Twitter; the term was coined by web designer Jen Simmons in 2007 in a tweet. Etymology templates: {{coinage|en|Jen Simmons|in=2007|nobycat=1|nocap=1|occ=web designer}} coined by web designer Jen Simmons in 2007 Head templates: {{en-noun}} fail whale (plural fail whales)
  1. (Internet slang) An image of a whale that formerly accompanied certain error messages on the Twitter microblogging website. Wikipedia link: Twitter, Twitter#Outages Tags: Internet Categories (topical): Twitter

Inflected forms

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Download raw JSONL data for fail whale meaning in English (1.8kB)


This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2025-02-22 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2025-02-02 using wiktextract (9e2b7d3 and f2e72e5). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.