Skibidi, a word that might have left many scratching their heads, has been officially added to the Cambridge Dictionary. Popularized by the machinima series Skibidi Toilet, the term has gained enough traction online to earn its place alongside words like lewk and tradwife.
At 29, I have to admit I still don’t quite get the appeal of Skibidi Toilet. It’s a wild machinima series featuring a war between human-headed toilets and camera-headed humanoids, with the latter defending Earth from the Skibidi Toilets. Honestly, it sounds like a fever dream of internet culture. Maybe I’m just too old for this kind of thing, but it’s interesting how a nonsense word like skibidi has taken on a life of its own.
Cambridge Dictionary defines skibidi as “a word that can have different meanings such as ‘cool’ or ‘bad’, or can be used with no real meaning as a joke.” Examples include phrases like “What the skibidi are you doing?” or “That wasn’t very skibidi rizz of you.” It’s kind of funny that a word with no fixed meaning has become official. Who would’ve thought?
Interestingly, the word skibidi existed before the series, originally the title of a 2018 song by Little Big, five years before Alexey Gerasimov’s peculiar toilet-headed characters appeared. Gerasimov’s series, though, really pushed the term into the spotlight, with 79 episodes and tens of millions of views per episode. That’s a lot of toilets fighting, or whatever it is they do
Skibidi Toilet’s influence has spread beyond YouTube. You can buy Skibidi Toilet skins in Fortnite, including an emote where your character pops out of a toilet singing the Skibidi song. Even Michael Bay is involved in a planned adaptation, which sounds wild enough to happen.
