Opp Is a New Term That's Popped Up on TikTok, but Don't Confuse It With OP

Since it first emerged as one of the most popular apps on social media, TikTok has continuously been responsible for the creation of new slang that may be unfamiliar to most people. These terms are sometimes acronyms, and sometimes, they're completely new words that can look like total gibberish to anyone who doesn't already know what they mean.

As the site continues to evolve, new users continue to invent terminology that exists online, and eventually makes its way out into the real world. The latest term that is making that leap is opp, and after seeing it on TikTok, many want to better understand what it means.

Opp is thankfully one of the more straightforward terms to come out of TikTok. The term is simply short for opposition, and is generally used to refer to people who are opposed to your point of view or your position on a particular issue.

Although the term has undoubtedly become more popular on TikTok, this is one of the cases where the term didn't actually originate there.

Instead, it was first used in the world of hip hop, and still pops up in lyrics for popular songs pretty regularly. The term's meaning is thankfully pretty easy to understand, so the next time you see it pop up in someone's caption or in a comment, you can know that that person is referring to people who they see as enemies or opponents. Of course, the reasons for that divide are nor necessarily apparent from the word alone.

The regular use of opps is a bit confusing, especially in online spaces, because it means something entirely different than OPs, which is another popular term that is used specifically in online circles. OPs are "original posters," and the term is typically used in the context of a reply or a comment to refer to the person who made the original post in a given thread of conversation.

This acronym has not yet made its way out into the real world, in part because the term is so specific to something that almost always happens online. Even so, opps and OPs look so similar that it can be easy to confuse them, even though the people who use those terms likely aren't using them interchangably.

As this article might have made clear, the vocabulary of the internet is evolving so rapidly that it can be difficult to keep up with all of the new words and phrases that are popping up. What makes matters even worse is that these phrases are often used without any sort of context or definition, which can make figuring out their actual meaning even trickier.

As the world of online language continues to evolve, just know that you're not the only person who may occasionally get confused. New words can trip up people of all ages.