the.com/like
The four-letter word that built billion-dollar empires out of a thumbs-up.
means To find something agreeable or pleasant — or, as a particle, the all-purpose verbal filler and quotation marker that peppers casual speech ('I was, like, done').
from From Old English 'lician,' meaning to please or be pleasing, rooted in a Germanic family (cousin to Dutch 'lijken' and German 'gleichen,' to resemble). The 'similar to' sense comes from a related Old English word 'gelic,' meaning 'having the same form' — literally 'with-the-body,' from 'lic,' body, the same 'lic' hiding in 'corpse' words across Germanic tongues. So the verb you do with a thumb and the word you use to compare things were once near-siblings, both circling the idea of 'matching' or 'suiting.' The modern filler-and-quotation 'like' is a 20th-century colloquial blossoming of the comparison sense.
- thumb origins
- Facebook's button almost shipped as Awesome instead
- verbal tic
- Valley girls weaponized it into a sentence pause
- old English
- Once meant body, as in lich and corpse
- dopamine engine
- Notifications hijack the same reward circuit as slot machines
- simile fuel
- Powers nearly every poetic comparison ever written
like button — facebook feature introduced 2009, now primary engagement metric across social platforms
like mike — 1994 film starring bow wow about a kid who inherits michael jordan's magical sneakers