A cyclical trend of interest in the ability to shoot spit from your salivary glands has TikTokers once again asking, “What is gleeking?” This is a phenomenon people seem to rediscover on an annual basis going back several years and is particularly popular among young people who love a gross talent they can whip out to impress their friends.
While it may seem unsanitary to some, many can remember the time during their youths that they first learned about gleeking and tried to master the skill along with their peers.
What is gleeking?
Gleeking is when you voluntarily or accidentally expel saliva from the sublingual glands under your tongue while your mouth is open, spraying spit out of your mouth like squirting a water gun. This may happen unintentionally while someone is yawning, especially if they are well hydrated, but a small number of people can learn to do it on command.
The mechanism for gleeking is not well understood, but it may have something to do with putting pressure on those glands, which is why it sometimes happens when people yawn. Expert practitioners also often advise people to drink a lot of water to load up on loose, squirty saliva, or stimulate its production with sour foods.
How to gleek:
According to The Guardian, only one percent of the population is able to gleek on command. Those who can may claim that you can train yourself to do this, and there are plenty of TikTok gleeking tutorials, but the skill may be out of most people’s reach no matter how hard they try.
Still, if you hope to be one of the lucky few, there’s little harm in trying.

One popular TikTok video from 2024 by @brennanyoungin explains the process like this:
- Stimulate the lingual frenulum (what he calls the “flappy part of the tongue”) with the tip of your tongue repeatedly in a bouncing motion.
- Lift your tongue to the roof of your mouth, exposing the underside, until saliva shoots out.
Pressing on the area under the tongue may help to stimulate saliva production. Other TikTokers have explained the process differently, advising viewers to move their tongues or jaws back and forth or flex their tongues to cause the spray.
According to Rutgers School of Dental Medicine department of restorative dentistry chair Steven Morgano, DMD, it’s possible that “pressure on the glands from the tongue […] causes the saliva to squirt out.”
Everyone’s mouth is different, so it may take experimentation to see which method works for you, if any.
Why are the TikTok kids doing this?
If you’ve ever raised a child, or even been one yourself, you might have noticed how excited they get when they discover a new bodily function. If it causes a strong reaction in others, such as disgust or delight, all the better.
Some TikTok users have expressed that they enjoy gleeking so much, they feel addicted to it. In 2023, @averykatherinewood posted a video talking about how she finds the action so entertaining that she wants to do it all the time, and even feels like it’s a compulsion.
@averykatherinewood this has gotten out of hand. #AXERatioChallenge ♬ original sound – Avery Katherine Wood
“I can go so far as to say, it’s affecting my day-to-day life,” she says. “I am addicted to gleeking.”
Additionally, she says it’s a handy mechanism to express disapproval or expel people who annoy her.
“It is like how Spider-Man has his web, no, that’s like me with gleeking. So if you say something annoying, I’m gonna gleek.”

TikTok videos about gleeking go all the way back to 2019, and you can find articles on the subject from 2016. There’s more popping up in 2025, and it’s safe to assume more will follow each year.
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