Slay is one of those words that feels like it came out of TikTok last week and is in fact about a thousand years old. The journey from "to kill in combat" to "you look amazing" is long, and most of the heavy lifting happened in Black queer communities decades before TikTok existed.
The Old English root
The verb "slay" has been in English continuously since before English was English. The Old English form is slēan — to strike, to kill — and it shows up everywhere from Beowulf to the King James Bible ("a time to kill, and a time to heal" was, in older translations, "a time to slay"). Through most of its first thousand years the word means exactly what it sounds like: to kill, usually with a weapon, usually in a story about heroes.
The metaphorical extension
By the late 19th and early 20th century the word starts being used metaphorically. American slang of the 1920s talks about a comedian "slaying" the audience — meaning killing them with laughter, leaving them helpless. It's the same logic as "killing it" or "murdering" a performance. Performance contexts are where this stretching of the verb is most natural: a comic, a singer, a public speaker can metaphorically kill the room.
The 1980s ballroom hinge
The crucial reframe happens in Black and Latin queer ballroom culture in 1980s New York. In the world documented in Paris Is Burning — vogue balls, houses, categories, walks — "slaying" a category meant nailing a performance so completely that the audience and judges had to acknowledge it. The word kept the violent overtone of older slang but added a register of camp and admiration that wasn't there before. To slay was to win, but it was also to be seen winning. It was social as much as performative.
Around the same period and slightly later, ballroom slang fed into the broader language of Black gay clubs, into RuPaul's verbal style on the New York scene of the late 80s and 90s, and from there into early 2010s drag-race television. By 2014 "slay" was already mainstream enough that it appeared on magazine covers and in advertising — a sign the word had escaped its original community.
The Beyoncé moment
"I came to slay" — the lyric from Beyoncé's Formation (2016) — is the moment "slay" stops being a community-internal word and becomes universal pop-culture English. The line was already familiar in ballroom and Black gay vernacular; Beyoncé didn't invent it. What Formation did was cite the lineage explicitly. From that point onward you can hear "slay" used by people who would never otherwise come into contact with the world Paris Is Burning documented.
The TikTok flattening
On TikTok, "slay" gets simplified. The performative, room-must-acknowledge sense narrows to something more like "good." A teenager texting slay as a one-word reply isn't necessarily evoking ballroom — they're using it the way an earlier generation used "cool" or "awesome." That flattening is what every successful slang word eventually undergoes. The word becomes more useful and less precise at the same rate.
By 2023 it's also being used ironically — "slay queen" in a sarcastic register, "slayed it" said about something mundane — which is the lifecycle stage that always precedes retirement. See the lifecycle of a slang word for the full five-stage arc; "slay" is currently somewhere between mainstream adoption and ironic phase.
The takeaway
The journey is: Old English combat verb → 1920s performance metaphor → 1980s ballroom compliment → 1990s drag mainstream → 2016 Beyoncé pop universalisation → 2020s TikTok flattening. Six stops, each of them about a generation apart. Knowing them changes how you use the word — or at least changes what you hear when someone else does.
See also: slay, AAVE and internet slang, drag & ballroom slang.