Delulu is slang for “delusional,” and “delulu is the solulu” means that believing in an unlikely outcome is itself the solution. The word began as a K-pop fandom jab at fans who fantasized about idols, then TikTok turned it into a motto for audacious self-belief in 2023.
What does delulu mean?
Delulu is “delusional” cut short and doubled into a rhyme: delu plus lulu. Merriam-Webster’s slang entry defines it as “delusional; audaciously self-confident,” and those two halves still sit side by side in how people use it.
The Cambridge Dictionary adds a detail the others skip. It defines delulu as believing things that are not real or true, “usually because you choose to.” That one word, choose, is what separates the slang from clinical delusion, and this page keeps coming back to it.
In practice you’ll hear it two ways. As a tease, it means you’ve lost the plot about a crush or a celebrity; as a badge, it means you’re backing yourself past what the odds say.
Delulu is the solulu meaning
“Delulu is the solulu” bends “solution” into a rhyme and claims the delusion is the fix: stop waiting to feel qualified and act as if the dream is already within reach. Its cousin, “may all your delulu come trululu,” does the same trick with “true.” Merriam-Webster lists both spin-offs and ties the newer sense directly to manifestation and positive psychology, which puts delulu in the same family as lucky girl syndrome.
People say it sincerely, ironically and as an insult, sometimes in the same week. On 26 March 2025, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told the House of Representatives that the opposition was “delulu with no solulu,” 9News reported.
Where did delulu come from? A dated timeline
Nobody knows who coined delulu. Every source we checked points to online K-pop fandom, and Merriam-Webster adds that the word “may have been coined elsewhere and earlier.” Here is what can actually be dated.
- The earliest dated use we found: a fan tweet about an idol reading “im so delulu am i?”, embedded on Dictionary.com’s slang page. Two more fan tweets follow in January 2014.
- The earliest Urban Dictionary entry we could retrieve describes a fan convinced they’ll end up with their idol.
- Merriam-Webster’s main dictionary gives 2015 as the first known use. That doesn’t match the 2013 tweets; we couldn’t confirm why.
- US searches roughly triple in a month, from about 1,500 to 4,700 (Ahrefs estimates).
- On TikTok, especially among young women, the meaning flips toward confident self-belief. The earliest “delulu is the solulu” video our TikTok search turned up is dated 8 August 2023. Who said it first is unknown.
- US searches peak at about 48,400 a month.
- Delulu makes the Collins Word of the Year shortlist. “Brat” wins.
- Merriam-Webster’s Slang & Trending entry carries a “last updated” date of 23 January.
- Cambridge announces delulu among 6,212 words added over the previous twelve months.
- Around 14,700 US searches a month, and #delulu shows about 18.5 billion views on TikTok (our API pull on 11 October 2026).
One warning if you’re repeating any of this: we found no evidence that the Oxford English Dictionary lists delulu, so treat any page claiming Oxford added it with suspicion.
How people use delulu today: crushes, careers and jokes
Crushes win by a distance. On Reddit, where around 60 posts a day mention delulu in the index we sampled (July to October 2026), the most common shape is a question to strangers: am I delulu, or do they actually like me? Career and dream-job posts come second. That crush-reading habit is confirmation bias doing what it does, finding a sign in every emoji.
Plenty of it is cheerful self-mockery, like confessing to a whole imagined romance with someone you’ve barely spoken to. Some of it pushes back. “Delulu is not the solulu” and “acceptance is the only solulu” both turn up in posts, usually from people who’ve noticed the habit costing them something.
In manifestation spaces the word sits next to SP and “living in the end.” By September 2023, at least one TikTok creator was tagging the phrase with #lawofassumption, the Neville Goddard practice we explain in our law of assumption guide.
Is being delulu good or bad? What psychology says
No study tests “being delulu” directly. What exists is adjacent research on positive illusions and on how picturing the future changes effort, and it splits in a useful place.
Positive illusions: an old, unsettled argument
In 1988, Shelley Taylor and Jonathon Brown argued that overly positive self-views, an exaggerated sense of control and unrealistic optimism are normal and good for mental health. Randall Colvin and Jack Block answered in 1994 that “it remains unproven that positive illusions foster mental health.” The strongest recent tally is a 2019 meta-analysis by Dufner and colleagues covering 299 samples and 126,916 people. Self-enhancement went with better personal adjustment, including over time; socially it was “a mixed blessing,” because people who rated their own competence unrealistically high tended to be judged by others as less warm.
Expecting versus fantasizing
Gabriele Oettingen and Doris Mayer’s 2002 studies sit even closer to delulu, since one group they followed was students with a crush. Positive expectations (judging a good outcome likely) predicted more effort and better results. Positive fantasies, enjoying vivid images of the outcome, predicted the reverse. If your delulu is mostly replaying the dream, that’s the pattern to watch; if it’s the nerve to send the application, it looks more like expectation. Oettingen’s later work on mental contrasting grew out of this, and our guide Is manifestation real? walks through the rest of the evidence.
Can you choose to be delulu? What philosophy says
Cambridge’s “because you choose to” runs straight into an old puzzle. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on self-deception asks: “How can a person intend to deceive herself without rendering her intentions ineffective?” If you know the odds and decide to believe otherwise, some part of you still knows the odds.
One way out, which the entry summarizes from Alfred Mele, treats self-deception as belief bent by wanting, with no plan to fool yourself at all. Much delulu fits that reading: ordinary wishful thinking with a catchy name.
The exit we find more useful runs through the encyclopedia’s entry on hope. Optimism is roughly believing an outcome is more likely than not, whereas “many philosophers hold that hope, properly understood, is independent of probability assessments.” You can hope for a long shot without believing it’s likely. Read that way, much of what people call delulu is hope in a joke costume, and it needs no false belief. Lisa Bortolotti makes a related case in a 2018 paper: optimism helps people reach goals when it supports agency, leaving them feeling capable and the goal looking both worth it and reachable.
Is delulu ableist? Critics and debates
The sharpest objection came early. In September 2023, HuffPost UK asked whether delulu was “a fun little trend or an ableist slur” and spoke to someone with lived experience of psychosis, a psychotherapist and a mental health activist, who argued the trend makes light of a frightening symptom. One interviewee named the paradox: if you can choose to go delulu, you aren’t delusional.
A second line of criticism is practical. Counselor Leon Garber, writing on Psychology Today’s blog in 2025, argues that delusional optimism makes it hard to drop a lost cause and leads to bad choices and heavier blows to self-esteem afterward. The Guardian’s 2023 explainer said flatly that no peer-reviewed research backs “a delulu moment.” A 2026 netnography presented at the HICSS conference went further, reading delulu content as a “utopian apparatus” that packages hope into products and algorithm-fed rituals.
Defenders exist too. Psychotherapist Alison McKleroy told TODAY that delulu is “almost like a self-efficacy tool,” while urging balance. The camps mostly agree on the facts; what they dispute is whether a joke word can borrow a clinical one without cheapening it.
When delulu is the solulu, and when it isn’t
Our view: keep the hope, check the plan. Delulu earns its place when it gets you to try the thing you were too embarrassed to attempt, such as applying for the role one level above yours. It stops earning it once the fantasy becomes the whole activity.
Some signs it’s time to step back:
- You spend more time decoding a crush’s signals than talking to them.
- The dream fills your evenings but hasn’t produced one concrete step in weeks.
- Each gap between hope and reality leaves you feeling worse about yourself, which is where it shades into toxic positivity.
- Someone offered “delulu is the solulu” as advice, and it felt like being told your problem is all in your head.
That last one comes from a real thread. On r/CPTSD, a poster said their therapist suggested the phrase for social anxiety, and it landed as dismissal. If that’s you, it’s fair to say so and ask for something more concrete. A wish about a specific person has a harder edge still: their feelings belong to them.
What tends to work better than pure delulu or pure realism is a pairing. Write the wish, name the main obstacle inside you, then pick one if-then step; that’s WOOP, and our manifestation journal prompts leave room for it.
Delulu FAQ: questions people ask
Is being delulu good or bad?
Neither by default. Research on positive illusions links self-enhancement to feeling better about yourself, while in Oettingen’s studies, daydreaming about a good outcome predicted less effort. Delulu that pushes you to act tends to help; delulu that stands in for acting tends not to.
What does delulu mean in love?
Usually that someone is reading far too much into a crush: one reply, one glance, one liked story. It’s mostly self-mocking. If you really want to know where you stand, a kind, direct question to the person will tell you more than any sign.
What does “may all your delulu come trululu” mean?
It’s a slang blessing that means “may your unlikely hopes come true.” Trululu plays on “true” the same way solulu plays on “solution.”
Is delulu in the dictionary?
Yes. Cambridge, Collins and Merriam-Webster all list it. Cambridge announced it in August 2025, Collins shortlisted it for its 2024 Word of the Year, and Merriam-Webster gives 2015 as its first known use. We found no evidence that the Oxford English Dictionary lists it.
Is it offensive to say delulu?
Some people with experience of psychosis find it trivializes real delusions. Joking about your own crush is the common use; aiming it at someone who is struggling is where it hurts.
Sources we opened for this page: Merriam-Webster, “Delulu” (Slang & Trending, updated January 23, 2025) and “delulu” (dictionary entry). Cambridge Dictionary, “delulu.” Dictionary.com, “delulu” (September 14, 2023). NBC News, “Collins Dictionary crowns ‘brat’ word of the year” (November 1, 2024). CBS News, “Cambridge Dictionary new words” (August 18, 2025). 9News, “Delulu with no solulu” (March 26, 2025). S. E. Taylor and J. D. Brown, “Illusion and well-being,” Psychological Bulletin 103, no. 2 (1988): 193–210. C. R. Colvin and J. Block, “Do positive illusions foster mental health?,” Psychological Bulletin 116, no. 1 (1994): 3–20. M. Dufner, J. E. Gebauer, C. Sedikides and J. J. A. Denissen, “Self-enhancement and psychological adjustment: A meta-analytic review,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 23, no. 1 (2019). G. Oettingen and D. Mayer, “The motivating function of thinking about the future,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 83, no. 5 (2002): 1198–1212. I. Deweese-Boyd, “Self-Deception” (2023) and C. Bloeser and T. Stahl, “Hope” (2022), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. L. Bortolotti, “Optimism, agency, and success,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 21 (2018): 521–535. K. Baskerville, “Delulu: a fun little trend or an ableist slur?,” HuffPost UK (September 27, 2023). L. Garber, “‘Delulu’ and defensive pessimism are harmful strategies,” Psychology Today (2025). A. Demopoulos, “Going ‘delulu’,” The Guardian (November 8, 2023). K. Burt, “TikTokers are embracing ‘delulu’,” TODAY (October 3, 2023). R. Gambetti, S. Biraghi and A. A. Beccanulli, “Faith in the Feed: A Netnography of Delusional Consumption Ideology,” Proceedings of HICSS-59 (2026). Search figures are Ahrefs US estimates; Reddit counts come from the SniffSub index; TikTok counts come from the TikHub API, all pulled October 11, 2026. This page is an editorial summary, not clinical advice.