Lore has been an English word for as long as there’s been an English language. 

In early Old English, lar, as it was spelled back then, meant knowledge or learning; in fact, the word lore is a distant relative of the verb learn itself. But over the centuries, that more general meaning has grown a little more specific, so that today the word is often used to refer not to knowledge as a whole, but to a particular body of facts or knowledge relating to a specific subject, field, or person.

From Old English to Online Slang

It’s this latter, more specific meaning that’s now found a new lease of life in the ever-changing world of Gen Z slang. In 2020s parlance, lore can now be understood to mean the particular personal history of someone—encompassing their childhood, family background, upbringing, past relationships, and everything else that goes into making you you.

​In this more modern context, lore is often specifically used in reference to the particularly intriguing or salacious details of a person’s backstory—just the kind of juicy gossip and information that someone might like to unload in a private conversation or (as is increasingly the case in the TikTok era) a tell-all social media post. And it’s this kind of personal infodump that has become known as a lore drop.

A Case of TMI

Also known as a lore stream or a lore dump, according to Merriam-Webster, in simple terms, a lore drop is a sharing of a person’s lore—sometimes with the implication that what is being shared, or how it is being revealed, is in some way excessive, unnecessary, or just generally far too much.

In that sense, too, though, lore dropping need not necessarily be personal information. In the context of literature and storytelling, for instance, a lore drop can also constitute an overly detailed or dry and verbose passage of exposition that sets out far more knowledge or intricate backstory than the reader necessarily needs to know. This is a problem often particularly associated with fantasy literature and online world-building, in which an author (in the absence of a more ruthless editor) puts down in writing all the minutiae of the world they have come up with, regardless of whether it is necessary to the plot or not.

So, no matter whether it is a personal history or a literary backstory, lore dropping is essentially the revealing of information—whether an audience wants to hear it or not.

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