In 2021, rizz was a small word used by a small number of people on Twitch. It meant something specific: the verbal skill of talking someone into liking you. Two years later it was in newspaper headlines and in the mouths of people who had never watched a stream. Oxford named it word of the year. By 2024 it was mostly a joke about itself.
That journey took about thirty months. Some words do it in six weeks. The interesting part is that the route almost never changes. Slang moves through the same five stages in the same order, and once you know them you can look at any new word and guess roughly how long it has left.
Stage one: the in-group
Every slang term starts somewhere small, inside a group that already shares context. Gaming lobbies and Twitch chat. Drill and grime scenes in London and Chicago. K-pop fandoms. A subreddit with forty thousand members. A school year group.
The single largest source of English internet slang is African American Vernacular English, a rule-governed dialect with its own grammar and a long history of invention. Most of the words in this article came from it. The pattern that follows is just as consistent: terms spread widely, get relabelled as “Gen Z slang,” and the community that made them gets no credit.
The important thing about stage one is precision. Glazing originally described a specific kind of excessive praise, usually of an athlete or a streamer, by someone whose judgement had been compromised by loyalty. It was not a general word for compliments. It had edges.
Most words never leave this stage. Thousands of terms are circulating in small communities right now that nobody outside will ever hear, and that is the normal outcome, not a failure.
Stage two: the export
Then someone builds a bridge.
Usually it is one account with a foot in two worlds: a creator fluent in the source community but with an audience far wider than it. Sometimes it is a single video pushed past its usual audience by the recommendation system. Either way the word lands in front of people who have no idea where it came from.
The comment section does the rest. Someone asks what it means. Three people answer, two of them wrongly. A stitch or a duet repeats it to a fresh audience, and a reaction video explains it badly. Within days the word is being used by people who have only ever seen it used, never heard it used properly.
Meaning starts to drift here, and the mechanism is simple: new users copy the form without the context. They can see the shape of the word and where it sits, so they can produce something that looks right. What they cannot see is the situation that made the original use funny or cutting. So delulu, which began in K-pop fandom as sharp self-mockery about parasocial fantasies, gets flattened into a general word for optimism. The edges come off.
| Stage | What is happening | How the word feels |
|---|---|---|
| One: the in-group | Coined and used inside a community with shared context | Precise, load-bearing, invisible to outsiders |
| Two: the export | A bridge account or single clip carries it to a general audience | Novel, slightly confusing, meaning already blurring |
| Three: saturation | Everywhere at once, stacked and templated | Fun, overused, starting to grate |
| Four: adult adoption | Brands, teachers, parents and headlines use it | Dead on arrival, faintly embarrassing |
| Five: irony or fossil | Kept as a knowing joke, or absorbed into ordinary speech | Either winking, or completely unremarkable |
Stage three: saturation
At saturation the word stops being information and starts being texture. It is in captions, in replies, in the titles of videos that have nothing to do with it. People use it because it is available, not because it is the right word.
Two things mark the peak.
The first is stacking. Terms start appearing in chains, because each one has become so lightweight that you need several to carry any weight at all. “icl ts pmo” is a stack: an honesty marker, a demonstrative and a complaint, welded into one unit. The same happens with softeners, where “lwk about to crash out” puts a hedge in front of a strong statement so it can be walked back.
The second is templating. The word gets a fixed frame around it. “X is so Y.” “Not the Y.” “Y era.” Once a word only appears inside a template, it has stopped being a word and become a slot filler.
Peak usage is usually the start of the decline. The value of slang comes partly from scarcity: a word that marks you as knowing something only works while there is something to know. At peak, that value has already been spent.
Stage four: the adult adoption
Now the outer ring arrives. A supermarket account uses it in a post about sandwiches. A teacher uses it in a lesson to seem approachable. A newspaper runs it in a headline with quotation marks around it. A parent uses it at dinner, correctly, which is somehow worse than using it wrongly.
People call this adults ruining the word, but that is not what happens. Slang does two jobs. It says a thing, and it says something about who is saying it. The second job dies here. If a word can be used fluently by a brand, a broadcaster and your uncle, it no longer tells anyone anything about the speaker.
Notice that the word usually still means what it meant. It works fine. It just costs nothing to use, so it buys nothing.
The response is rarely a debate. It is a quiet, collective drop. The people who used the word first stopped around late stage three, which is exactly when everyone else was starting.
Stage five: irony or fossil
Words end in one of two places.
Some survive ironically, used with a visible wink by people signalling that they know the word is finished. “Yeet” lives here, and so does “sus,” along with most 2020 slang, kept alive as a joke about itself. Irony is a real afterlife and can last years, but the word is doing a different job: it is a reference, not a description.
Others fossilise into ordinary vocabulary and stop being slang at all. This is the quieter, more successful ending. “Cool” did it. “OK” did it. “Ghosting” did it inside a decade and now appears in advice columns with no explanation. Yap is well down this road, because it fills a genuine gap: English had no compact verb for talking at length to no purpose. Words that name something the language actually lacked tend to survive. Words that were mainly a badge tend not to.
How to tell which stage a word is in
- Where you first saw it. Inside a community you belong to means stage one. On a clip from a community you do not follow means stage two already.
- Whether people are explaining it. Explainer videos and “what does this mean” comments are the signature of stage two. Nobody explains an in-group word to the in-group.
- How many meanings it has. One precise sense means early. Three loose overlapping senses means saturation.
- Whether it is stacked or templated. Chains of slang and fixed frames are stage three markers.
- Who is using it in your feed. Brands, institutions and headlines are stage four. That is not a comment on them. It is a measure of how far the word has travelled.
- Whether it comes with a wink. Deliberate, self-aware use, with a slight pause around it, means stage five.
Why the cycle keeps speeding up
Slang has always worked this way. What changed is the clock, and four things drive it.
Recommendation is the biggest. Older slang spread through connection: you heard it from someone you knew. Recommendation spreads by similarity, so a clip can jump from a small community to millions of people with no link to it. Stage two once took months of person-to-person contact. A single push can now do it overnight.
Short video compresses the exposure. A phrase in a fifteen-second clip can be seen by the same person eight times in an afternoon. Repetition that once took a year of school corridors happens in one sitting, so a word reaches saturation and exhaustion in the same week.
Audience size matters on its own. When the pool is a few billion people, even a word with narrow appeal finds enough users to look ubiquitous.
The last change is the most underrated: language now spreads mainly by text. Written slang can be copied exactly, with no accent and no voice, by someone who does not know how it is pronounced. That removes the friction that used to slow adoption and keep words tied to their communities. It is also why so much current slang is initialism. Speech does not produce many words like icl. Typing does.
None of this is decay. It is the same process running faster on better infrastructure. The vocabulary turns over quickly, and the underlying grammar stays exactly where it was.
What this means if you just want to keep up
- Learn the method, not the word list. Any list is out of date on publication. Working out a word from its position, sound and context is a skill that does not expire, which is the point of our method for decoding unfamiliar slang.
- Look up the word you actually met. Reading a full dictionary end to end teaches you little. Looking up one word in the sentence where you found it teaches you a lot, because the sentence supplies the context.
- Read the stage before you use the word. If a term reached you through a brand or a headline, using it will say something about you that you may not intend.
- Do not chase. Understanding slang and speaking it are separate skills, and only the first is generally useful.
Questions people ask
How long does a slang word usually last?
Most terms that escape their original community run the full cycle in one to three years, and plenty never escape at all. A small number stop being slang entirely and stay in the language for decades.
Does a word die because adults use it?
Not exactly. Adult use is the visible sign that a word has finished spreading, and a word that has spread everywhere can no longer signal who is inside a group. It is a symptom of the decline rather than the cause.
Why does the same word mean different things to different people?
Because meaning drifts at stage two, when new users copy the shape of a word without the situation that produced it. The original precise sense usually survives inside the source community while a looser one spreads outside it.
Is internet slang making people worse at English?
There is no evidence for it. Slang is vocabulary, and vocabulary sits on top of grammar rather than replacing it. People who use a lot of it in messages generally switch registers fine.
Can you tell in advance which words will survive?
Not reliably, but there is one decent signal. Words that fill a real gap, naming something English had no compact term for, survive far more often than words whose main function was marking who was in the know.