all your base are belong to us
- idiom
- Slang
- Whenever someone dominates an online game, someone inevitably comments 'all your base are belong to us'.
Examples
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After their team won unexpectedly, they jokingly posted 'all your base are belong to us' on social media.
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The meme 'all your base are belong to us' still circles around internet forums years after its origin.
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We won the match, and now all your base are belong to us!
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After the final score, they shouted, all your base are belong to us!
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After their team won unexpectedly, they jokingly posted 'all your base are belong to us' on social media.
-
Whenever someone dominates an online game, someone inevitably comments 'all your base are belong to us'.
-
The meme 'all your base are belong to us' still circles around internet forums years after its origin.
Surface Forms
Morphology
all + your + base + be + belong + to + us
Despite the ungrammatical surface word order, the lexical meanings of 'all', 'your', 'base(s)', 'belong', 'to', and 'us' yield a straightforward propositional meaning — that 'we possess/control all your bases' — which naturally conveys victory or superiority. This compositional possession structure is cross-linguistically common, so a B1 learner who knows the constituent words can readily infer the intended sense even without prior exposure to the meme.
Etymology
All your base are belong to us comes from a badly translated line in an old video game, where a villain boasts that all the player's bases now belong to him. People on the internet found the strange English funny and began using it as a joke to show 'victory' or that they had beaten someone.