fanum tax

Fanum tax means taking a bite or a share of someone else’s food without asking. If your friend grabs a fry off your plate, they just collected the fanum tax. It is a joke, not a real rule, and it comes from a streamer named Fanum.

What does fanum tax mean?

The “tax” is the little portion a friend helps themselves to: a chip, a bite of your sandwich, a sip of your drink. Saying “fanum tax” as you grab it turns the theft into a running gag. People also use it more loosely for anyone taking a cut of something, from a sibling eating your leftovers to a parent claiming some of your Halloween candy.

How to use it

• “You can’t eat a burger near me without paying the fanum tax.”
• “My brother fanum taxed half my fries.”
• “Mom collected the fanum tax on my birthday cake.”
• “Hide your snacks, the fanum tax is real in this house.”

Where it comes from

The joke started with Fanum, a Twitch streamer and member of the content group AMP, alongside streamers like Kai Cenat. Starting in late 2022, Fanum made a habit of grabbing food from other members on camera. Know Your Meme traces the earliest documented instance to a Kai Cenat stream on December 23, 2022. Clips went viral through 2023, and the phrase became a fixture of Gen Z and Gen Alpha slang.

Related terms

• rizz: charm, another Kai Cenat-era word
• skibidi: Gen Alpha nonsense slang
• gyatt: a viral reaction word
• bussin: food so good it’s worth taxing
• brain rot: what too much meme content does to you

See more terms like this in our Gen Z slang dictionary.