确认过眼神què rèn guò yǎn shén

确认 is “to confirm”, 过 marks something done, and 眼神 is the look in someone’s eyes.

As a meme it rarely has to do with eyes. 咬文嚼字 explains it as plain “checked” or “confirmed”. The usual shape is 确认过眼神，是……的人: “I’ve checked: you are the … type.”

It peaked in 2018 and now sounds a little dated, but people still use it, often with a new ending: 确认过眼神，是不想上班的人. It works for friends who share a taste, and as a joke about a stranger you size up in one second.

The words come from 醉赤壁, a 2008 song by the Singaporean singer JJ Lin, where they are about meeting the right person.

They became a meme on Chinese New Year’s Eve in 2018. A picture with the caption 确认过眼神，你是广东人 joked about the small red envelopes that people in Guangdong give, and it started a debate about how much money goes in a red envelope in each part of China.

咬文嚼字 put it on its list of the ten most popular phrases of 2018, and the National Language Resources Monitoring and Research Center put it on its list of the top internet words of the year.