Hold My Unicorn

About

“Hold My Unicorn” is an online slang expression said in jest as an alternative reading of the acronym “hmu” in lieu of its far more commonly accepted meaning, “hit me up.”

Origin

The acronym HMU, which stands for “hit me up,” first entered colloquial usage online sometime in 2009, with the earliest known Urban Dictionary entry for the term submitted on April 19th.

HMU: AIM acronym for “hit me up.”
I’m bored. someone HMU.

On September 17th, 2010, Urban Dictionary user UnicornLover238 submitted an entry for “HMU,” defining it as an acronym for “Hold my unicorn.” Within five years, the submission became the top-voted definition for the abbreviation with over 13,500 up votes.

HMU: Hold my unicorn.
Hey, what’s up? Can you hmu? I need to tie my shoe.

Spread

In December 2010, Facebook identified the acronym as the top globally trending keyword in status updates of the year, which further boosted the subversive effort to change its meaning.

In early 2009, the acronym HMU was virtually unheard of. Only a few posts a day contained HMU, and half of them were probably typos. By May, however, it started to grow slowly and was averaging about 20 posts a day. The volume roughly doubled every month, and by the end of 2009 it had risen to 1,600 posts a day--too modest of a number to be on our radar for last year’s list. However, HMU continued to grow aggressively throughout 2010, increasing by about 75 percent each month. By the end of summer, HMU reached 80,000 mentions per day.

On May 28th, 2011, Sodahead Forums^[3] member marahtovish responded with “hold my unicorn” to a user asking what the acronym “hmu” stood for. On June 27th, Tumblr user immaculate-minds^[5] posted a list of alternative expansions for the acronym “hmu,” which included the phrase “hide my unicorn” (shown below).

On November 18th, 2012, a Facebook^[4] page titled “Hmu means Hold My Unicorn” was launched. On September 14th, 2013, Wordreference Forums^[2] member Wanda_Brown submitted a thread to the Spanish-English vocabulary board asking “What does hold my unicorn mean?” On January 26th, 2014, electronic producer Inquisitive released an electro house track titled “Hold My Unicorn” on SoundCloud (shown below).