vape

A verb meaning to inhale and exhale the aerosol produced by an electronic cigarette or similar vaporizer, and the noun for the device itself. The word spread out of harm-reduction and ex-smoker circles in the early 2010s, was named Oxford's word of the year in 2014, and now sits firmly in mainstream speech across English-speaking countries. It covers nicotine vapes, cannabis vapes, and zero-nicotine flavored devices, and shows up in regulation debates, school discipline policies, and TikTok trends in roughly equal measure. As a verb it works both transitively ("vape a pod") and intransitively ("she vapes outside"); the gerund "vaping" is equally common.