吗喽
Worker monkey
吗喽也要休息。Monkeys need rest too.
吗喽 is a dialect word for “monkey” from Guangxi and Guangdong. Online it stands for the tired, underpaid worker, and people use it to describe themselves.
- Took off
- 2023
- Started in
- Guangxi dialect
- Today
- Current
What it means
The 吗喽 is the worker with no say in anything: up early, paid little, sent here and there. 吗喽的命也是命, “a monkey’s life is a life too”, is the classic line. It belongs with 打工人 and 牛马.
It is self-mocking. Calling another person a monkey is still an insult.
How people use it
It is common among young workers and students, often with a monkey sticker.
下班了吗？
Off work yet?还没，老板又给了我一个任务
Not yet. The boss gave me another task.吗喽的命也是命啊
A monkey’s life is a life too.
[Sticker] Monkey holding a sign: 'a monkey's life is a life too'本吗喽今天要加班到十点
This monkey is working late until ten tonight.
More examples
早上七点就开会，我这个吗喽太难了。
A meeting at 7 a.m. Life is hard for this monkey.
下班了，吗喽终于可以回家了。
Work’s over. The monkey can finally go home.
Where it came from
The Paper traces it to the Spring Festival of 2022 in Guangxi, when buyers pressed fruit sellers to ship sugar oranges faster. One seller, working overtime, called himself a 吗喽 and wrote 吗喽的命也是命. This is one article’s account, and we found no second source for it.
Monkey stickers, video effects and parody clips followed, and by 2023 the monkey was a standard picture of the worn-out worker.
Related memes
Related slang in the dictionary: 牛马 · 社畜
Sources
- The Paper, 2023 (in Chinese) (m.thepaper.cn)
- TMTPost on 吗喽 (in Chinese) (tmtpost.com)
Checked November 2026. The picture at the top is our own drawing of 灯灯. The original meme image belongs to its owner and is shown to explain the meme. To ask us to remove it, write to legal@dengdeng.app.
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