Wordbank (Walrus)

About

WordBank (Walrus) is an in-joke on Reddit inspired by a photograph of a preschooler’s incorrect response to an English vocabulary quiz misidentifying a drawing of Walrus as a “word bank,” a term used to indicate the portion of the prompt listing all answer choices in a test. After a photograph of the quiz reached the front page of Reddit in February 2014, users on the site began referring to walruses as “wordbanks.”

Origin

On February 19th, 2014, Redditor gynoceros submitted a photograph of his five year old’s arctic animals quiz to the /r/funny^[1] subreddit, in which his son mistakenly labelled an illustration of a walrus with the term “word bank” (shown below). In the first 24 hours, the post gained over 42,900 up votes and 1,200 comments.

Spread

After the photograph was posted to Reddit on February 19th, 2014, Redditor TheDerpDragon submitted a picture of a walrus titled “Just a Wordbank relaxing on a beach” to /r/funny,^[2] where it gathered more than 40,400 up votes and 1,000 comments in the next 18 hours, followed by Redditor soupsoundsgood’s /r/funny^[4] submission of a baby walrus photo titled “A newborn baby Wordbank,” as well as an illustration of a seal walking a walrus in an Imgur^[7] post titled “Just a walrus taking a wordbank for a walk" (shown below).

That same day, Redditor pimple_poppins submitted a screenshot of the Wikipedia page on walrus to /r/funny,^[6] which had been edited with the title “Word Bank” (shown below). Within the next hour, Redditor ooyat submitted a post asking why Redditors were referring to walruses as “wordbanks” to the /r/OutOfTheLoop^[5] subreddit, to which several Redditors replied with the arctic animals quiz photo.