泰裤辣
So cool
泰裤辣！So cool!
泰裤辣 is a sound-alike spelling of 太酷啦, “so cool!”. Since spring 2023 people have used it to praise something in an over-the-top way.
- Took off
- 2023
- Started in
- A concert speech
- Today
- Fading
What it means
The characters mean “Thai trousers, spicy”, which is nonsense: they are there for the sound. Said with a lot of energy, 太酷啦 comes out as tài kù là.
How people use it
Today it is mostly ironic. People write it to praise something that is not cool at all, or to make fun of their own excitement.
看，我自己做的书架！
Look, I built this bookshelf myself!泰裤辣！
So cool!就是有点歪
It’s a little crooked, though.歪也泰裤辣
Crooked is cool too.
More examples
这个舞台设计，泰裤辣！
This stage design is so cool!
他一个人骑车去了海边，泰裤辣！
He biked to the sea all by himself. So cool!
Where it came from
The speaker was the singer 小鬼, Wang Linkai. In a 2023 speech to his fans, he said, in short, that he was a stubborn person, and that if you could be like him, he thought that was 太酷啦. Sources disagree on the stage: some name a music festival in Shenzhen in March 2023, others a TV show.
Clips of the line went viral on Douyin and Bilibili from late April to May 2023, and remixes put it everywhere. By the end of the year, many users called it the most overused meme of 2023.
The original. A clip of the singer speaking to his fans from a stage. Jiemian wrote about the meme in 2023. Jiemian (in Chinese)
Related memes
Sources
- Jiemian, 2023 (in Chinese) (jiemian.com)
- Sohu explainer (in Chinese) (sohu.com)
Checked November 2026. The picture at the top is our own drawing of 灯灯. It is not the original meme image.
Ten Chinese memes
One Chinese internet meme every three days for a month: where it came from, what it means and how to use it.
