Entry · catalog no. 9094
cancel
/ — /pending
verb · Nationwide · 2026
✓ Verified
1.
To publicly withdraw support from a person over something they said or did — to write them off, collectively. Often stretched into "cancel culture" by people describing the pushback rather than practicing it.
“They tried to cancel him after the old tweets surfaced.”
Origin & Attribution
Black Twitter turned an old breakup line — "you're cancelled" — into a tool of collective accountability in the 2010s, a way for people without institutional power to register disapproval together. The mainstream press adopted it and largely rewrote it as a moral panic, detached from the Black online culture that built it.
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide / diaspora
Nationwide · 2026
Spoken by
Nationwide
$CANCELThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Rising0 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
12/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
2026
in the culture
Recorded here
2026
point of first record
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
Hear it spoken
By region — how it actually sounds
@auntiereg
Atlanta, GA
@deltasoul
Memphis, TN
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Citations & Sources
■
BuzzFeed News, "So Much Modern Slang Is AAVE" — article · reference
submitted
■
+ Cite a sourceBlack Twitter, cancel culture usage — cultural history · 2010s
submitted
See also