陰キャ (inkya)

What it means

1. 1.

   A shadow type: quiet, indoorsy, not part of the loud group. Its opposite, 陽キャ (yōkya), is the sunny, sociable kind.

2. 2.

   Self-applied it is a joke; applied to someone else it is an insult about their social standing, and in schools it is used as one.

   The pair has largely displaced the older ネクラ/ネアカ, which now sounds distinctly 1980s.

Examples with translations

• 私は完全に陰キャなので、飲み会は苦手です。

  I'm an indoor sort through and through, so drinking parties are not for me.

• クラスの陽キャたちが騒いでる。

  The loud crowd in class are at it again.

Where it comes from

陰 ('shade, yin') plus the first syllable of キャラ ('character'), the word Japanese uses for a person's social persona. The yin-yang pairing is doing real work: these are treated as two fixed types rather than a spectrum.

First attested: 2010s

Other forms

Romanised as:

inkya