alley-oop

Alley-oop in basketball is a play where one player passes the ball high near the hoop for a teammate to catch and dunk. Standard sports vocabulary. Not concerning. If your kid uses it constantly, ask them where they first heard it, not to police their speech but to understand which online community they are in. Most slang of this kind moves through TikTok and group chats, so seeing it in your child's vocabulary just means they are plugged into normal teen internet culture.

Alley-oop is a basketball term describing a play where one player passes the ball high near the hoop for a teammate to catch mid-air and dunk. Use in sports writing. Formal equivalent: "a lob-to-dunk play." Common non-native mistake: hyphenation. Standard form is "alley-oop" (hyphenated). The phrase has French origins ("allez, hop!" meaning "go, jump!"). Read or listen to the word in context several times before trying it yourself; the right register is harder to learn than the dictionary meaning.