Sus was already slang for suspicious, but it became a global meme when the social deduction game Among Us, released in 2018, surged in popularity in 2020. Players used it in emergency meetings to accuse crewmates of acting like the impostor, and clips of those accusations spread across TikTok, YouTube and Discord. Short sus audio clips were then lifted into countless edits, where the word alone signals doubt, guilt or a bad lie, a shorthand that has outlived the peak of the game itself.