Why Do We Say “Cheese” When Posing for Photos?

It’s something that’s probably now so familiar that you’ve likely never stopped to think about how obviously weird it is: You all happily line up for a photo, and the photographer calls out “Say cheese!” before clicking the shutter.

So why do we say “cheese” when posing for a photo?

A World of Random Words

Well, first of all, this isn’t something unique to the English-speaking world. Around the world, photo-takers have their own myriad versions of saying “cheese,” which typically involves saying some similarly random word or phrase.

In Sweden, for instance, it’s “omelet.” In France, it’s often “marmoset.” German photographers might ask their subjects to say “cheesecake,” or “spaghetti.” Russian speakers say “raisins,” Koreans say “kimchi,” Danes say “orange,” Bulgarians say “cabbage,” and—perhaps most bizarrely of all—Finns say the local Finnish word for the vendace freshwater fish.

The fact that these words seem so arbitrary and so utterly unrelated to photography is (according to one explanation here, at least) the entire point. These words are used by photographers because their sheer bizarreness and randomness make people laugh when posing for a photo, which has the understandably welcome effect of getting them to flash their widest, happiest smile.

The Phonetics of a Perfect Smile

That’s likely at least part of the reason why these words have caught on in this way, but on a linguistic and phonological level, there’s also something a little subtler going on here, too. In English at least, the word “cheese” just so happens to have a long “ee” vowel in the middle of it, which, just like an easy-going laugh, has the effect of naturally widening someone’s mouth.

So not only is “cheese” a suitably random word designed to raise a smile, but asking someone to “say cheese” in a photo also forces their mouth to form a smile (albeit somewhat artificially).

The same can be said for many of the other words used in this way around the world. The French word for a marmoset, for instance, is ouistiti; supposedly coined imitatively, as an onomatopoeic recreation of the kind of high-pitched sound an actual marmoset might make, it too has its fair share of “ee” sounds. The same goes for the “ee” at the end of a German “spaghetti,” and the Korean “kimchi.”

Whether it's a dairy product, a pasta dish, or a small jungle primate, the goal remains the same: a linguistic trick that forces a perfect smile.

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