What Does This Mean?
A Japanese term, literally "lily," used as a genre/fandom label for anime, manga, and other media depicting romantic or intimate relationships between female characters. It functions as the female-focused counterpart to Boys' Love/yaoi, spanning everything from subtextual "close friendship" stories to explicit romance.
REAL-WORLD EXAMPLE
"That new slice-of-life is giving heavy yuri undertones between the two leads."
LORE & ORIGIN
The term was coined in 1976 by Itō Bungaku, editor of the gay men's magazine Barazoku ("Rose Tribe"), who introduced "yurizoku" ("lily tribe") in a reader-mail column as a parallel term for lesbians, mirroring the magazine's existing "barazoku" (rose tribe) label for gay men. The white lily had already carried associations with feminine beauty and purity in Japanese literature since the Romantic era, which is why it was chosen as the counterpart symbol.
Hentai manga and doujinshi artists later adopted "Yuri"/"Yuriko" as literal character names for lesbian characters, cementing the flower name as the genre's own label. By the 1990s-2000s it had become the standard fandom term — used both in Japan and, via translation, in English-language anime/manga fandom — for the genre covering female-female romantic and intimate relationships.
EQUIVALENT CONCEPTS IN OTHER LANGUAGES
MENTIONS OVER TIME
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