1. A common Japanese girl's name meaning 'lily.'
2. Language spoken in the islands of
New Guinea and the Amazon.
3. A genre of sexually explicit anime/manga literally meaning Girls Love. It is a Japanese jargon term
for content and a genre involving love between women in manga, anime, and related Japanese media.
Yuri can focus either on the sexual or the emotional aspects of the relationship, the latter sometimes being called shōjo-ai by western fans.
The themes
yuri deals with have their roots in the Japanese lesbian literature of early twentieth century, with pieces such as Yaneura no Nishojo by Nobuko Yoshiya. Nevertheless, it is not until the 1970s that lesbian-themed works began to appear in manga, by the hand of artists such as
Ryoko Yamagishi and
Riyoko Ikeda. The 1990s brought new trends in manga and anime, as well as in
dōjinshi productions, along with more acceptance for this kind of content. In 2003 the first manga magazine specifically dedicated to yuri was launched under the name Yuri Shimai, followed by its revival Comic Yuri Hime, launched after the former was discontinued in 2004.