Stan Culture

Where the word comes from

In 2000, Eminem released "Stan", featuring Dido. It's told through the letters of an obsessed fan who gets angrier every time Eminem doesn't write back. It ends badly.

Over the next decade, "stan" turned into the word for a superfan, and then a verb: "I stan." It's in the dictionary now.

Know your fandoms

Getting a fandom's name wrong is a rookie mistake. The big ones:

• Beyhive: Beyoncé
• Swifties: Taylor Swift
• Barbz: Nicki Minaj
• ARMY: BTS
• Little Monsters: Lady Gaga
• Navy: Rihanna
• Arianators: Ariana Grande
• Beliebers: Justin Bieber

What stans actually do

• Streaming parties: playing a new song on repeat to push its chart position.
• Voting: flooding fan-voted awards.
• Trending: getting hashtags to the top of X.
• Fancams: short edited clips of their fave, dropped into replies on totally unrelated posts.
• Defending the fave: anyone who criticizes their artist gets a flood of replies. When Beyoncé's Lemonade (2016) mentioned "Becky with the good hair", the Beyhive filled the comments of people they suspected with bee emojis.

Stan power, for real

• 2020: K-pop fans and TikTok users claimed they'd reserved huge numbers of tickets to a Trump rally in Tulsa, which ended up with lots of empty seats. How much they actually affected turnout is debated, but politicians noticed.
• November 2022: The presale for Taylor Swift's Eras Tour crashed Ticketmaster. The US Senate held a hearing about Ticketmaster in January 2023, and the Justice Department sued its parent company in 2024.
• 2023: Swifties dancing at a Seattle show shook the ground enough to register on seismic monitors, earning the nickname the "Swift Quake". The Eras Tour went on to become the first tour to gross over $2 billion.

The dark side

Stan culture can get ugly: harassment, doxxing (posting someone's private info) and threats aimed at critics, journalists, or even the artist's exes. The word for the feeling behind it is parasocial: a one-sided relationship where you feel like you know a celebrity who has no idea you exist. It was Cambridge Dictionary's Word of the Year for 2025.