Right On to Rizz

My generation had "right on," "groovy," and "far out." My son's generation says "I gotta bounce" and "let's circle back on that." Every generation seems to invent its own vocabulary out of thin air — and it turns out a surprising number of these words have real, documented origins, some of them formal enough to have landed in an actual dictionary. Here's a century of it, roughly one generation at a time.

The Jazz Age 1920s–30s, Greatest Generation

Flapper and Prohibition-era slang leaned deliberately absurd — a whole family of nonsense compliments built on comparing something great to random animal anatomy.

• Bee's knees — one of dozens of joke phrases in the same family ("cat's meow," "elephant's adenoids"), all meaning "excellent"
• Cat's pajamas — same meaning, same nonsense-compliment tradition
• Copacetic — meaning "just fine"; likely African American Vernacular English or Creole in origin, spread through jazz circles
• Hotsy-totsy — perfect, excellent
• The berries — anything wonderful
• "And how!" — enthusiastic agreement

Postwar Jazz & Jive 1940s–50s, Silent Generation

This era has an unusually well-documented origin point: bandleader Cab Calloway's 1938 Cat-ologue: A "Hepster's" Dictionary, believed to be the first dictionary published by an African American author.

• Hep cat / hepster — "a guy who knows all the answers, understands jive," per Calloway's own definition
• Daddy-o — friendly term of address, jazz-club origin
• Cool cat — someone stylish and self-assured
• Greaser — the leather-jacket, slicked-hair look of the decade
• Jake — everything's fine ("Everything is Jake")
• Know one's onions — to genuinely understand what you're talking about

Peace, Love & Groovy 1960s–70s, Baby Boomers

Some of this era's signature words are older than the era itself. "Groovy" actually traces back to 1920s jazz culture (the "groove" of a record) and shows up in the trailer for 1947's Miracle on 34th Street — decades before the hippies made it their own. Even the word "hippie" has a documented first print appearance.

• Groovy — excellent, in a state of enjoyment; 1920s jazz origin
• Far out — amazing, mind-blowing
• Right on — agreement, approval
• Dig it — to understand or appreciate something
• Bread — money
• "Hippie" — first appeared in print September 5, 1965, in a San Francisco Examiner article by Michael Fallon

Rad, Gnarly & Totally 1980s–90s, Generation X

Surf and skate culture supplied a lot of the vocabulary here, and pop culture cemented it into the national conversation almost immediately.

• Gnarly — from 1970s surf culture, hit the mainstream via Sean Penn's Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982)
• Radical / rad — born in skateboarding culture
• Gag me with a spoon — pure Valley Girl, cemented nationally by Frank Zappa's 1982 song "Valley Girl"
• Eat my shorts — entirely Bart Simpson's doing
• Take a chill pill — calm down, relax
• Psych — "gotcha," a playful fake-out

Bae, Fleek & YOLO 2000s–2010s, Millennials

This is the first generation whose slang was born and spread almost entirely online rather than through TV or radio — which means some of it has an unusually precise, documented birthday.

• YOLO — "you only live once," popularized via Drake
• On fleek — looking flawless, perfectly done
• Epic fail — a spectacular failure, gaming-culture origin
• Adulting — successfully handling responsible, grown-up tasks
• Humblebrag — began as a Twitter account in 2010, a documented, exact origin
• Stan — obsessive fan, from Eminem's 2000 song of the same name

No Cap, Rizz & Sus 2010s–2020s, Generation Z

No generation has minted new slang faster, thanks largely to TikTok — and this is the first generation whose words are getting formally crowned by actual dictionaries almost every year.

• No cap — no lie, I'm serious
• Rizz — charisma, especially romantic charm; Oxford's Word of the Year for 2023
• Sus — suspicious; popularized by the game Among Us
• Bet — yes, agreed, it's on
• Mid — mediocre, unimpressive
• Cheugy — peaked in 2021 and was already considered outdated within a couple of years — possibly the fastest a slang word has ever gone stale

Right Now 2020s, Generation Alpha

The dictionary-crowning trend just kept accelerating.

• Brain rot — Oxford's Word of the Year for 2024, describing the mental effect of consuming too much low-quality online content
• "6-7" — Dictionary.com's Word of the Year for 2025
• Chud — fool, troll, or jerk
• Mogging— outdoing or outshining someone else
• Sigma— a person who is independent, self-sufficient, not a part of social hierarchies, and possibly a bit of a loner
• Glazing— flattering or sucking up to someone
• Maxxing— maximizing, optimizing, or otherwise going all-in on something
• Huzz— an attractive woman or group of women
• Chopped— anything that is ugly, unappealing, or uncool
• Clanker— an insulting term that denounces AI, robots, and similar technologies
• Delulu— delusional
• Larping, larper— someone pretending to be someone they are not
• Unc— short for uncle and is essentially a way of calling someone old
• Foid— mixes “female” and “humanoid” and is generally used only by members of misogynistic online “incel” or extremist communities

One honest caveat worth stating plainly: a good chunk of what reads as "Gen Z slang" wasn't actually invented by Gen Z at all. Much of it originated earlier in African American Vernacular English or ball culture and simply went mainstream once a new generation picked it up and ran with it — adoption, not invention, which has arguably been true of American slang going all the way back to the jazz clubs that gave us "hep cat" in the first place.