duckroll

English

Etymology

From duck +‎ roll. In 2006, Christopher "Moot" Poole implemented a wordfilter replacing egg with duck on 4chan, causing instances of eggroll on the site to become duckroll. This inspired an anonymous 4chan user to create an image macro featuring a duck with wheels edited onto its body and the caption "duckroll." The image was later used to prank 4chan users, who were lured into clicking what was presented as an interesting link, but instead lead to the "duckroll."

Noun

duckroll (plural duckrolls)

1. (Internet slang) A bait-and-switch Internet prank involving the sharing of a link that leads to a picture of a duck on wheels instead of what is claimed.

   You told me that it was a really nice picture, but all I see is a duckroll.

   • 2011, Cole Stryker, Epic Win for Anonymous: How 4chan's Army Conquered the Web, page 60:

     Duckroll became a silly prank meme when 4chan users started linking their friends to an ostensibly cool site, only to be met with a picture of a duck on wheels with the word duckroll written on it.

   • 2015, Jamie Bartlett, The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld‎^[1], page 251:

     Examples of bait-and-switch images and videos include The Hampster Dance, Duckroll, Rickroll, […]

   • 2022, Carlos Avitia-Velazquez, Javier Avitia-Velazquez, Curb Children, unnumbered page:

     When you've been around to witness Rickrolling go from a forced-meme variant of the traditional 4chan Duckroll to having Rick Astley himself sing “Never Gonna Give You Up,” unannounced and on live national television, during the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade last year, it's hard to ignore how crucial the 4chan-spawned Anonymous “Hivemind” has been to the development of internet culture since its inception six years ago.

   • For more quotations using this term, see Citations:duckroll.

Derived terms

• rickroll

Verb

duckroll (third-person singular simple present duckrolls, present participle duckrolling, simple past and past participle duckrolled)

1. (transitive) To prank (someone) in this fashion.

   Internet pranksters keep duckrolling me!

   • 2011, Cole Stryker, Epic Win for Anonymous: How 4chan's Army Conquered the Web, page 60:

     So you’d send a friend a link with, “Hey, check out these new screenshots of the Playstation^[sic] 4,” but when they clicked on the link, BAM, duckroll’d.

   • 2011, Sharon Kleinman, The Media and Communication Dictionary: A Guide for Students, Educators, and Professionals‎^[2], page 91:

     This spurred some people who had been duckrolled to duckroll others.

   • 2015 June 23, Ana Samways, “Sideswipe: June 24: A lesson in rickrolling”, in New Zealand Herald:

     Before it was know as rickrolling, it was known as duckrolling, which is the same thing, but instead of going to the Astley video, you end up looking at a picture of a duck with wheels. At that point it is said that you have been "duckrolled".

   • For more quotations using this term, see Citations:duckroll.