100+ Gen Z slang terms with definitions, example sentences, and trend status — updated quarterly.
Last updated: July 2026 · Refreshed quarterly to track what's in, fading, and retired
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If you are wondering what Gen Z slang is, it's the words people of a certain age use—born in 1997 or later, the first internet generation. They have their own language, and like previous generations, it's been influenced by the people they are friends with, the TV and films they watch, and their take on the world. Some of these words and phrases have even become memes.
Slang used to take forever to reach other parts of the country, but nowadays, thanks to the internet, a slang phrase can spread locally within a day. A girl could make a video on TikTok on Monday, and by Friday the entire generation could be using it. The origin of the slang terms on this page ranges from Black American English to the language of gamers, K-pop fans, meme accounts, and even fan clubs (or "stan communities") of celebrities.
Some words teenagers use because they sound cool when used by others their age, while others use them because their peers use them and they feel they belong to a community. There are 124 terms that are currently Trending, Current, Established, Fading, or Retired. You can look up any word to see its current status, a definition, and actual examples of how the word is used in a sentence.
Surprisingly, as I researched the origin of Gen Z slang, most of it didn't start with Gen Z. This generation is a master remixer and amplifier of language from different communities, subcultures, and media that existed before they were born. Once you know where the words come from, the rest of the slang starts to make sense.
Black American Vernacular English (AAVE) is by far the largest single contributor to this lexical soup. So much of Gen Z slang, slay, shade, tea, bussin, no cap, cap, lowkey, highkey, woke, periodt, originates in Black American communities, and many of these words have been part of that community's lexicon for decades. The expression slay, for example, has been in use in Black drag culture to express admiration for someone doing something exceptionally well for a long time. The expression no cap is rooted in Black Southern speech, where capping means to lie or to boast. Gen Z mostly speaks in borrowed AAVE, and it is generally acknowledged without much credit being given to the communities from which these words originated.
Language from gaming communities such as Among Us featured heavily in our corpus. Sus exploded in 2020, originally from the multiplayer game, where it described a suspicious player suspected to be an impostor. Words such as GG (good game), no-scope, clutch, and NPC (non-player character) were also borrowed from general gaming slang. Gaming is a major pastime for millions of young people worldwide and thus acts as a pipeline for general youth slang. Millions of hours are spent by young people in these virtual worlds, and thus inevitably lots of this language will leak into other areas of their lives.
The stan culture and fandom communities were responsible for the popularity of the term stan, which came from the 2000 Eminem song about an obsessive fan, and it means a devoted superfan (or "stan"), ship (or two people who are in a relationship), canon (which is used in daily conversation), and era (or "I'm in my villain era"). These communities revolved around musicians, actors, athletes, and fictional characters and created a unique language to talk about parasocial relationships and group identity, which leaked into the mainstream.
TikTok is probably the biggest driver for Gen Z slang in this era. That's how rizz (coined and popularized by streamer Kai Cenat) or delulu (delusional, originally spread in "stan spaces" on TikTok) or countless other audio-driven phrases make their way to millions of teens and young adults all over the world. TikTok shows videos based on what's trending (or popular), not based on demographics, so a catchy phrase can go viral.
Twitter/X and old memes gave Gen Z its dry, sarcastic sense of humor. That's where words like ratio (when a reply gets more likes than the post it's replying to, meaning the post lost) and based (a Lil B word for being yourself without caring what people think, later reused by different online groups) come from.
The biggest indicator of a cringeworthy Gen Z-er is when they try to sound Gen Z after learning about slang from an article, parenting book, or corporate marketing campaign. Why? Because slang functions as a badge of membership in certain online communities, and using it correctly shows you're already part of that community. Any misuse of slang makes you seem like an outsider desperately trying to fit in.
Gen Z slang is easy to mess up if you don't know when to use each word. Take slay. It's slang that means you're hyped about something. So if you shout "slay!" at a colleague for presenting a report about weak earnings, it makes you sound like you're trying hard. Compare that to saying no cap when someone says something true; it shows you fit in. Using it in context means that you understand it and are not trying to fit in.
Understand the word that you want to use for slang before you use it. The word rizz refers to a person's romantic charm and how they can make something look easy. Using rizz in a sentence to describe someone's business presentation skills would be wrong because that is not what rizz is. Based is a great example of a word that can be used as a compliment or an insult, depending on the situation. This is how the word is intended to be used.
Time, though, is not on your side. Gen Z slang becomes outdated so fast, business leaders and celebrities in particular get ridiculed for using the words of Gen Z to look younger. This dictionary indicates whether or not a slang word is fading or even retired, so you can simply steer clear of it if you want to sound current. Or, even better, read up on this dictionary as a parent to better understand what your teenager is saying to you. They may be using a word marked as Retired by the time the rest of the world has caught up with your teenager.
So there's this honest way to look at using slang: understand the slang that you read about, and that's about it. If you naturally picked up on slang from being on TikTok or on Discord or even just gaming online, then more power to you; use it. But otherwise don't even try to use the slang that you read about in some news article or in some parenting book or even in some marketing pitch.
One clear sign that a Gen Z term has gone mainstream is if it appears on a headline, a corporate tweet, or a presidential campaign. At that point, the slang's exclusivity within the youth has crossed over. It's no longer a secret code that a certain age group understands because everyone knows what it means.
FOMO (fear of missing out) is another word that has crossed over so seamlessly that most dictionaries include it today, and everyone (young and old) uses the acronym without any hint of irony.
The term ghosting has become the accepted term to describe a relationship that was cut off without any explanation whatsoever. It is a term used by therapists, journalists, and even dating writers to describe a particular type of relationship. It has crossed over and is here to stay.
The word woked up (or simply woke) originates from Black activist groups and is used to highlight and show awareness of racial issues. As Progressive individuals used the word, Conservatives saw fit to turn it into an insult.
This is why words like lit and GOAT (Greatest of All Time) are now acceptable to use in intergenerational communication. Nobody even bats an eye when a sports announcer calls someone the GOAT or when your grandparents declare something to be "lit." This is the full lifecycle of a word: it starts in isolation within a particular subculture or community and eventually becomes part of the mainstream lexicon most people can understand and use. When a word reaches the end of its lifecycle as slang, it becomes just another word in the language.
This is also why we created the filter for the dictionary to distinguish between words that are still trending, words that are currently used, and words that have already crossed over into everyday language. Most of the words in this dictionary are still currently used by many people and thus will be understood by most.
For generations, older people have worried about how young people talk. It's nothing new. Each generation comes up with its own slang to express itself. In the 1960s, for example, hippies used words like groovy to describe things that were cool. For about a decade, groovy was just the right word. But then it started to seem dated, and soon it was no longer cool to say that something was groovy. In the 1990s, kids talked about things that were phat, and they tried to be cool and chill. In the 2000s, there was bling, and in the 2010s, things were on fleek (a phrase that made particular sense for people with perfectly coiffed hair); there were baes, and people twerked.
Youth slang has always existed. What is different about Gen Z slang is how quickly slang words cycle through use. A word can be "cool" for months, but within six months, it's ancient. Most youth slang words only get widespread use for a short time. Social media drives how quickly slang spreads among youth worldwide, only to face harsher judgment. This can happen in as little as two days for a slang word to spread via social media. Often, within a few days or weeks of a word gaining widespread use on social media, the same word shows up in brand tweets, news segments, and other mainstream media outlets.
It doesn't have to be shallow, though. The words rizz, slay, based, and no cap have stuck because they fill a space that English, in general, does not fill well enough. In contrast, words that are only trendy for a little while typically do not endure. To learn more about how words are coined and spread, check out our word of the day tool and our list of cool words. We have even traced the history of words that have made the whole journey to become permanent additions to the English language.
Rizz refers to natural charm, or a person's magnetic charisma. Typically, someone with rizz can attract romantic interest without even trying. Instead of using scripted pick-up lines or making an obvious effort to win someone's affection, a person with rizz seems to attract others simply by being present. This word gained popularity through Kai Cenat, a streamer. It eventually spread to TikTok from 2021 to 2022, and was recently declared Oxford's word of the year for 2023. There's also an unspoken verb form of this word, in which to "unspoken rizz" someone is to attract them without even saying a word to them.
Perhaps the most popular Gen Z term in 2025 is 6-7, a viral numerical meme with no meaning. My son would say "6-7" with a matching hand gesture, and I asked him what it meant; he said he didn't know, which was true. Other popular terms during this period were crashing out, meaning having a strong, negative emotional outburst, and Aura farming, denoting wearing jewelry, clothes, or performing certain actions to look cool or gain "aura points" in public.
A lot of Gen Z slang has faded or been retired, including on fleek (peaked around 2014–2015), yeet (as an exclamation), salty (upset or bitter but no longer funny), lowkey (used purely as filler with no emphasis), and lit (just fun or exciting, etc.). You can probably tell when a word has retired because you see it in a how-to use slang guide for parents, in a corporate social media post, or in a politician's campaign material. In this dictionary, every term has been given a status badge. You can filter by terms that are "fading" or "retired" to see the full list.
"No cap" is Black American slang that translates to "seriously" or "I'm not lying." Since capping typically means lying, boasting, or exaggerating, saying "no cap" after a statement tells others to take what you just said seriously. This is essentially the opposite of cap or capping, which translates to "lie" or "make something up." In this example: "That was the hardest exam I've ever taken, no cap." This phrase is also similar to other phrases that indicate seriousness, like "I'm not even joking" or "for real."
Yes, some of the slang is recognized by formal dictionaries such as Merriam-Webster and Oxford Dictionaries. Rizz, for example, was added to both dictionaries and was even named Oxford's Word of the Year in 2023. However, because formal dictionaries are based on printed publications, they typically lag behind the current living language by years. It can take a long time for a dictionary to acknowledge a word and add it to the lexicon, and it requires documentation of usage in many publications over time. Right now, most current Gen Z slang will almost never appear in printed dictionaries, so readers can turn to online resources like this one for the most up-to-date definitions.
So fast for slang terms these days. They can get invented in a niche online space and be spread globally within days via TikTok. They can reach their peak within a few months, get featured in mainstream media, and be picked up by brands and accounts. Then within a few short months they get chunked into the category of "cringe" (overused, co-opted, etc.). There are exceptions to this, though: there are a number of terms that have filled a semantic "gap" in our language and therefore are here to stay for now (rizz, slay, based, for example). Then there are words of fashion that get invented to describe something (a look, behavior, style, etc.) and get used for as long as that style is "in" and then get dropped from use pretty quickly. Our own aesthetic words list and cool words dictionary list words like this that have, in the end, entered mainstream language (i.e., they have "crossed over"). We refresh this dictionary of slang terms every quarter, so do check the status for each term on the status badges we have used.