パクる
ぱくる
pakuru
= to rip off / plagiarize / copy without credit; also to snatch/steal, or to get caught/arrested
If a Japanese Twitter thread is accusing an artist of tracing someone else’s work, or a friend is calling out a game for stealing another game’s designs, パクる (pakuru) is almost certainly the verb doing the work. It is the blunt, everyday way to say someone copied something and passed it off as their own.
The dominant modern use of パクる is “to plagiarize” or “to rip off” in the creative sense: copying an idea, artwork, song, logo, or even a tweet without permission or credit. It shows up constantly in discussions of manga, games, fashion, and music, where someone’s design or melody looks suspiciously close to an existing one. Two older senses survive alongside this: パクる can mean to physically snatch or swipe something (like a friend grabbing your fries), and in more dated slang it means to nab or arrest someone (keisatsu ni pakurareta, “got nabbed by the police”). The noun form パクリ means “a rip-off” or “a knockoff” and is used constantly on its own, as in kore, pakuri janai? (“isn’t this a rip-off?”). Grammatically it’s a godan verb: past tense is パクった, and the passive パクられる means “to get copied/ripped off” (or, in the older sense, “to get caught”).
パクる is casual and accusatory — it directly implies someone stole credit, so it’s usually reserved for callouts, gossip, or online arguments rather than neutral description. The noun パクリ is extremely common by itself: pakuri dezain (“a ripped-off design”) or simply pointing and saying pakuri!. Learners often mix up the two voices: パクる is “to rip off” (the copier is the subject), while パクられる is “to get ripped off” (the original creator is the subject) — so watashi no kyoku, pakurareta means “my song got copied,” not “I copied a song.” Because it’s slang, avoid it in formal writing, reviews, or legal contexts; there, use 盗用 (tōyō, plagiarism), 模倣 (mohō, imitation), or 剽窃 (hyōsetsu, the formal legal term for plagiarism) instead.
Everyday use
この漫画のキャラ、あのゲームのデザインをパクってるよね。
Kono manga no kyara, ano gēmu no dezain o pakutteru yo ne.
This manga character totally ripped off that game’s design, right?
Casual / Social Media
このイラスト、有名絵師の構図をパクってるって炎上してる。
Kono irasuto, yūmei eshi no kōzu o pakutteru tte enjō shiteru.
This illustration is getting dragged online for ripping off a famous artist’s composition.
Formal / Cultural context
そのロゴは他社のデザインをパクったとして、正式には「盗用」と報じられた。
Sono rogo wa tasha no dezain o pakutta to shite, seishiki ni wa “tōyō” to hōjirareta.
The logo was formally reported as “plagiarism” (tōyō) after being accused of copying another company’s design.
Accusations of パクる run deep in Japan’s fan-driven creative spaces, especially doujin (fan-made comic and game) culture, where artists constantly reference, riff on, and pay homage to existing works. The line between homage and theft is a running debate, and パクる is the word people reach for when they think that line has been crossed — it carries an accusation of intent that softer words like 似ている (“similar”) or 影響を受けた (“influenced by”) deliberately avoid.
The word also surfaces in high-profile controversies outside fandom, most famously in corporate logo and Olympic emblem scandals where a new design was called out online for resembling existing work too closely. Because Japanese social media moves fast and screenshots travel further than corrections, being labeled with パクリ can do real reputational damage even before any formal plagiarism claim is made — which is part of why the word feels so loaded compared to its clinical legal counterpart, 盗用.