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IF YOU’VE BEEN on Twitter in the last 24 hours, you’ve probably seen something like this.

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Er, what’s that?

This is the Sign Bunny. It’s a text drawing, composed of various Japanese and Korean characters and assorted bits of punctuation.

Last night, it exploded all over Twitter to the extent that it inspired almost as many complaints as it did imitations.

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So where did it come from?

Well, the Sign Bunny has been around for a long time. A Topsy search suggests that it was first tweeted at least three or four years ago.

Over the last month alone, Sign Bunny has appeared in around 134,000 tweets. But until yesterday, they were pretty much all teenage pop fans saying this:

Er, what happened last night then?

Well… it blew up. Here’s the number of Sign Bunny tweets in the last few weeks:

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And here’s what happened yesterday:

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Tracing the specific origin is difficult as the volume of tweets is so high, but essentially the meme broke out of the world of fangirls and fanboys when a Twitter influencer in the media got hold of it.

Someone like this, with 30,000 followers. (Although probably not *actually* Evelyn Rusli from the Wall Street Journal).

One possible suspect is Amber from Tumblr, who tweeted this a little earlier…

And then everyone just went crazy?

Pretty much. Before long, EVERYBODY was at it. From media outlets to brands.

OK. So how do I do one?

Well, you *could* go and look up keyboard codes for all the characters that make it up. Or you could do this:

You’re welcome.

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