Meaning of go viral | Babel Free

Definitions

To be rapidly and frequently shared, especially through social media, but (with retroactive application to pre-internet occurrences) also via gossip or as a collective response to broadcasting or widespread print circulation.

Equivalents

Examples

“Hundreds of long-forgotten texts that went viral in the 19th century are being discovered by a new collaboration of humanities scholars and computer scientists.”

“After watching hours of these videos, I realized there’s no use trying to make sense of any one of them, but taken as a body of work, they tell a story: the struggles of a person trying to go viral again.”

“Li Lina, a resident in the Hanyang district, beat a gong and shrieked from her high-rise balcony this weekend to beg for help for herself and her stricken mother holed up at home. A neighbor filmed her cries and uploaded it to the Internet, where it went viral.”

“A group of girls from Norway asked me why their videos weren’t going viral like the ones from their American peers.”

““Once you know how to make a video go viral, it’s just about how to get as many out as possible,” he told Bloomberg in December. “You can practically make unlimited money.””

CEFR level