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AAVE glossary

AAVE — African American Vernacular English — has been the largest single source of new American English vocabulary for at least a century. Cool, hip, jive, dig, chill, fly, dope, fresh, def, phat all came from it before the internet existed. The current TikTok-era vocabulary continues that lineage; many words that read as 'Gen Z slang' are decades-old AAVE that recently broke wider.

This glossary collects AAVE-tagged terms with attribution where we have it. For more on the lineage, see the longform AAVE piece in /learn.

Bottom line

Crediting Gen Z or TikTok for AAVE words is an inaccuracy that erases the actual origin. We try to put that right in etymology where we can.

Read more on this

The lifecycle of a slang word: cringe → core → dead

Slang doesn't live forever. Every word goes through the same four stages — and most of them die in less than three years. Here's the model.

Where slang is born now: TikTok, Twitch, Discord, and the platform pipelines

Slang doesn't get invented in dictionaries. It gets minted on Twitch, tested on Discord, scaled on TikTok, and ironized on Twitter. Here's the pipeline.

AAVE and internet slang: where most of the words actually come from

Most of the slang you think TikTok invented came from somewhere older. A clear look at AAVE's role in modern internet language — without the dodging or the flattening.

Other era hubs

✨ Gen Z slang

📱 Gen Alpha slang

📅 2024 slang

🇬🇧 British slang

📅 2025 slang

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