What On Earth Does “POG” Mean On Twitch?
If you’re new to Twitch, you might be seeing and hearing some words you’ve never come across before. One of these will likely be “POG”, “POGGERS” or “POGChamp”, so what do they mean?
Since the birth of the internet, we’ve seen a consistent stream of new words and acronyms being added to our dictionaries. This applies every time a new popular platform pops up.
Twitch is one of the latest platforms to grow in popularity. It’s a video and gaming streaming platform that was acquired by Amazon which homes some of today’s biggest gamers and content creators.
Some streamers you may have heard of include Ninja, xQc, Trainwrecks, summit1g, Pokimane, HasanAbi, Shroud, Tfue, The Grefg and AdinRoss. There are also many large entertainment companies that have official channels on the platform.
Within any of the streams being aired by these broadcasters, you’ll notice some unusual things being said. We don’t just mean strange takes from chatters, but even some words you may have never heard.
One of the most popular Twitch-born terms is “Pog”. It is typed regularly in most chats, but what exactly does it mean?
What Does “POG” Mean?
POG is an abbreviation for “play of the game,” but it’s more often used as an exclamation of awe and wonder when something really remarkable has occurred in a game or online conversation.
A Twitch streamer may exclaim “POG” or “That was POGGERS” after a particularly resounding victory. The chat may also enliven with messages reading “POG” or “POGGERS” if the streamer makes a significant, impressive play.
The term is also associated with several Twitch emotes, with POGChamp originally displaying Ryan “Gootecks” Gutierrez looking impressed with his mouth open. After some controversy relating to Ryan following the Capitol Riots, the original image was replaced with a picture of a komodo dragon performing the same expression.
How To Still See The Original PogChamp Emote On Twitch
In addition to the official emotes that are offered by Twitch, users can access some Chrome add-ons from the likes of BetterTTV and 7TV among others. Once installed, all of the emotes that have been added by the streamer you are watching are added to a separate list of emotes available to the channel.
Within the huge library of user-created BTTV and 7TV emotes are some recreations of the OG POGChamp emote. One of the most widely-used examples is the close-up of the mouth called just “Pog”.
The only issue with using these third-party emotes is that any users in the same chat that do not have the third-party applications installed will not be able to see the actual emotes. Instead, they will just see the shortcuts typed to display them.
With “Pog” this isn’t really a problem, as most people generally know what it means now anyway, but with some more vague shortcuts, the chat will look, to them, like a wall of nonsense spam.
