What Does Sauce Mean In Anime? Detailed Explanation

Sauce is a slang for source in anime. Like if you make a claim about a series, people will ask you for the sauce meaning the source of that claim i.e. where it came from. Fans of anime use the slang a lot and where it came from is a particular anime series as well as 4Chan.

What is Sauce in Anime?

If you go through the comments of any post with a picture or clip of anime, one of the most common written words you’re likely to see is “sauce”. In as much as the word sounds familiar, to most amateur anime fans, it may appear to them like some in-circle code that needs cracking. On the contrary, it is quite commonplace and not mysterious, even with the additional meaning the word sauce carries in the anime lingo.

Actually, “sauce” refers to the word “source”; it’s mainly used by anime fans when they’re trying to find out the origin of some anime video clip or photo whose original source wasn’t shared by the poster.

Where Does Sauce Originate From in Anime?

This practice, done by fans of anime, of using the word sauce when they mean to refer to a source for something, originally started in 2000. This was the year of release of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex episode 9.

In one of the scenes, there were two chatting in a virtual reality chat room. One of them now said that he got info from one of his sources. The second person had heard sauce and so, sarcastically, asked whether it was pork cutlet or oyster sauce it was that info came from.

This was the first time that sauce had been confused with source in anime. But use by a large number of people was to come four years later.

What Does Sauce Mean In Anime? Detailed Explanation
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Sauce Becoming Popular as Source

Although the source-sauce mix-up was caught in episode 9 of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, it wasn’t until 2004 that people actually started using sauce as slang for source. That was when a 4Chan user named Moot began using the word sauce when asking for the source of anime excerpts. He also browsed through the anime community on 4Chan; wherever he saw source, he would clean it and write sauce.

His handiwork was later undone, but by then, the horse had already bolted out of the gate; many were now using sauce in place of source. Now, if you go to the Urban Dictionary-which talks about explanations behind slangs-you will find sauce there as a slang for source.

Does Sauce have a Japanese meaning?

Sauce in Japanese is also pronounced the same as “source”.  if you hear them, they both sound like Sōsu (ソース). Sauce in the Japanese language carries the same meaning as its equivalent in the English language.

Examples of Usage of Sauce in Anime

Sauce, Plz?

Could I get the sauce, please?

What’s the sauce, bro?

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