What Does "Chudai" Mean? The Centuries-Old Roots of the Viral Porn Slang

One second I’m a chudai, then suddenly the chudai is me!

If you’ve been anywhere near X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, you’ve seen it: “chudai.” Whether it’s above random shirtless photos, explicit videos, or tucked into some version of “what is chudai,” it’s been pervasive. And there’s stats to prove it: for the past year, Google searches for the term “chudai” have increased steadily. In fact, those searches doubled between August and now. And so, to the burning question: what exactly is chudai and why is everyone tweeting about it?

“It’s an ironic form of circulation,” Dr. Geeta Patel, professor of Middle Eastern and South Asian languages and cultures at the University of Virginia, tells Them of the current viral nature of the term. Patel has also taught and written queer theory, amongst other topics, since the 1980s. “Because even if people don’t understand it, they are using it exactly in the ways its history says it was used. They don’t understand where it comes from literally and figuratively, they don’t understand what it means but they’re actually semantically and physically carrying the semiotics — the linguistic valence that the term has in this situation.”

Here, Them explains how a word from the 1800s found rebirth as a globally viral meme.

What does chudai mean and where does chudai come from?

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Though the word may be new to many, it’s not new to the world. As far back as 2006, contributors to Urban Dictionary were helping define it. “Chudai means fuck,” one commenter wrote. “Sex between man and woman.” Another user noted that it was “Hindi/Urdu slang." Others online have buttressed these origins of it being an informal term meaning the act of sexual intercourse. But it stretches much further back than that.

“Rather than calling it Urdu-Hindi, you can call it Hindustani,” Patel says. “That’s actually probably truer to the ways in which people speak. It’s a more everyday language and doesn’t fall into the Muslim-Hindu divide.” And while Patel confirms that chudai does translate to fuck (or copulation if one were to be clinical), after consulting a dictionary from 1884, she finds definitions that specifically refer to sex in the context of prostitution or sex work. She also points to “chudai thana,” a term meaning to live by pimping or otherwise in the industry surrounding prostitution to further underscore the connection between sex and commerce with the term.

Why do people say “chudai” on Twitter/X?

The specifics of chudai’s origins on social media are speculative at best. Porn performers and social media users contacted for this article as well as various sources online indicate that it likely began in India. Some speculate that the word exploded as a result of bot-run accounts using the term to seek traffic and comments from user bases in India where pornography is restricted and thus more difficult to access.

In theory, “chudai" helped that content circumnavigate censorship because it could still be searched on the platform, as X otherwise limits searches of words that are known to be associated with pornographic material. The vestiges of the term’s Indian roots are most visible on platforms like XVIDEOS, which has videos from as early as two years ago featuring Indian performers that include the word.

It’s important to note that chudai is not specific to gay porn: the lionshare of videos on X under the search term remain mixed-sex couplings.

Why is chudai in all of my porn captions?

So much online is an oral history, and such is the same with chudai. It appears that gradually over the last year or so, chudai, which had been previously used in the Indian market, was adopted by others, notably gay Brazilian adult performers. Possibly done as an attempt to skirt shadow bans, these users (and presumably some bots) began to employ the word as captions to promote their own clips.

“What’s interesting is to think about the circulation of a term that both is in relation to monetization and that evades censorship that would preclude monetization globally,” Patel says connecting this international digital use with the original intent from the 1800s. “When we think of translation, we think of a literal conversion that is a word into another word and in this case it is literally translated through the use.”

But as with many things on Gay Twitter, repeated use to promote adult material has led to a rebirth of sorts as a meme. Users like Computer_Gay and Blizzy Mcguire have turned chudai into content without any explicit material. As many random terms before it, the word has become a part of internet culture, though carrying with it its own centuries-old history.

“In this case the use becomes a palimpsest of a history of the use of the word — it’s like a memory,” Patel says.

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