Yesn’t

Yesn’t is a made-up, alternate version of the word “no”, which is often used as a satirical synonym online.

The term was born as a joke, by applying a negatory grammatical structure to the word “yes”, that became popular in 2018 after a petition was submitted on Change.org to exchange “no” for “yesn’t” in English vocabulary.

It is believed that the person behind the idea is an Urban Dictionary user under the name of Robert Funk, who posted his article on yesn’t to the site in 2008. In his article, he uses the word “yesn’t’ as a substitute for both “maybe yes”.

However, the term did not reach popularity until 10 years later, when the petition was launched on Change.org. The petition was the instance which kick-started the rise of the term in popularity.

Just a few days subsequent to the launch of the petition, yesn’t began to appear on various boards of Reddit, such as r/me_irl or r/dankmemes.

Eventually, the board r/yesn’t was born on May 16, 2018.

Two days later, on May 18, a YouTube video titled yesn’t was uploaded by the channel Memetastic. The video uses a galaxy brain template and shows various obscure derivatives to yesn’t, like “noyep” and ‘anti-yes”.

• Mashable.com – Over 26,000 people sign petition to change the word ‘No’ to ‘Yesn’t’
• Reddit.com – r/OutofTheLoop