Public conversation
How often each term surfaces in open discussion, which catches a word spreading before search volume moves.
Online momentum
What slang is moving right now?
A transparent signal from public discussion, Google breakout searches and Slangary reads—not a claim to measure the whole internet.
How the ranking works
What this leaderboard measures
Breakout searches
Sharp rises in people looking a term up. This is the clearest sign that a phrase has escaped the community that coined it.
Slangary reads
Which entries people open here. It is the smallest of the three signals and the one most shaped by what we have already written about.
Momentum is about change, not size: a term climbs by moving faster than it was moving last week, so a small word growing quickly can outrank a common one that is flat. None of this measures the whole internet, and a term missing from the board has not necessarily stopped being used.
Year by year
The slang of each year
The board above reads momentum right now. These are considered rankings of the terms that actually characterised a year, written once the shape of it is clear.
How a term travels
The five stages of a slang term
Momentum is easier to read once you know which stage a word is in. Almost every term on this board is somewhere in the following sequence, and the stage explains both how fast it is moving and how long it is likely to keep moving.
- 01 · In-group
Used by the community that coined it
The term does a job no existing word does, for a group that needs it. Search volume is near zero because the people using it already know what it means. Most slang never leaves this stage, and that is not failure — it is what in-group vocabulary is for.
- 02 · Bridge
One account carries it outward
A creator with an audience outside the original community uses it. This is the moment that decides almost everything: the term arrives at scale with whatever framing that one person gave it, which is why so many words shift meaning at exactly this point.
- 03 · Breakout
People start looking it up
Search volume spikes, because the audience now includes people who do not have the context. This is the stage a leaderboard can actually see, and it is already the second half of the story rather than the beginning.
- 04 · Saturation
Brands and headlines adopt it
The term appears in marketing copy and news write-ups. Usage is at its highest and its usefulness is falling, because a word that signals belonging stops doing that once everyone has it.
- 05 · Ironic or retired
It survives as a joke, or it goes
Either the term is used knowingly about its own datedness, or it drops out of speech. A few settle into ordinary vocabulary and stop being slang at all — which is the rarest outcome and the only permanent one.
What this cannot tell you
Reading the board honestly
Rising is not the same as new
A term climbs when interest grows faster than last week, and plenty of words here are decades old. A spike usually means a term reached a new audience, not that anyone just invented it.
Search follows use
People look a word up after hearing it, so any search signal lags real usage — often by weeks. By the time a term ranks here it has already been circulating somewhere.
Absence proves nothing
The board ranks only terms with an entry here. A word missing from it may be thriving in a community this dictionary has not covered yet.
The tracked set
Every term on the board
The leaderboard only ranks terms that already have a written entry, so the tracked set and the dictionary are the same list. Open any term to read its meaning, origin and usage.
Crash OutAura PointsMoggingUncBFFRPMOLet Him CookUnderstood the AssignmentLitExtraBasicBestieBoujeeBussin'ShookPeriodtWokeRent-FreeSecure the BagGrindsetWe BallTotesCrayDeadEpicLegitVanillaThird WheelYou Do YouZone OutDitchAmpedTL;DRGRWMOMGFRAhh / -AhhIYKYKNo CapDeluluRizzMain Character EnergyBetSusMidSlayAteBasedCringeLowkeySaltyFlexGhostingSituationshipThe IckSoft LaunchTouch GrassRatioStanSpill the TeaThrow ShadeClapbackReceiptsVibe CheckSimpGoatedDripBrainrotYappingCookedLock InGlazingNPCCanon EventIt’s GivingChronically OnlineParasocialRage BaitDoomscrolling