10 Slang Terms Kids Are Using in 2025, Decoded

Every generation has its own slang. But with Gen Z and Gen Alpha now spending more time online than watching television, their internet-based vernacular in particular has become increasingly unpredictable and—unless you’re online as much as they are—increasingly difficult to decode.

Today, slangy words and phrases fall in and out of fashion quickly, as the memes, songs, and viral videos that inspire them explode in popularity and then die away as something new takes their place. Keeping track of what your kids are saying and meaning, ultimately, can be something of a parental nightmare. As a little bit of an explainer, here’s a quick guide to 10 kids’ slang terms that have made a mark in recent months.

1. Aura farming
2. Do it for the plot
3. Gyatt
4. Lizard
5. Mewing
6. Steez
7. Straight fire
8. W in the chat
9. What the sigma?!
10. 67

Aura farming

In the 2020s, aura has come to be used slangily of someone’s stylishness, coolness, or charisma (or some equally impressive combination of all three). Now, though, the word has gone one step further with the coinage of aura farming—that is, actively trying to improve your own aura and look cooler and more impressive in the eyes of other people (a practice you might also hear called “earning aura points”).

If all of that sounds like a good thing, though, be careful: Aura farming can be used negatively too, to describe the kind of desperate “pick-me” behavior of someone whose attempts to look cool come across as overly obvious or overreaching. As for the reference to farming? That’s thought to have emerged from the world of video games, in which players or characters have to accumulate or “farm” different resources or qualities. 

Do it for the plot

Where once there was YOLO, now there’s do it for the plot. If you imagine your life as one big movie, “doing something for the plot” means doing something bold or risky that, in the retelling of your life story, would act as a major plot point. Whether that’s taking a big risk, trying something new, making an important change, or taking on something new or challenging, it’s all about moving on for the sake of the bigger picture. You only live once, after all. 

You Might Also Like ...

• 1980s Slang: 27 Totally Tubular Terms
• The 20 Most Commonly Confused Word Pairs in America
• 25 Words That Don’t Mean What They Used To

Add Mental Floss as a preferred news source!

Gyatt

Just as you might see damn jokily and emphatically spelled out as “dayum” or “day-um” online these days, so too might you see “gyat” or “gyatt”—a slangy respelling of the god in god***n, Columbia University linguist and professor John McWhorter explained to TODAY. The word is thought to have originally emerged in African American Vernacular English in the 2000s as a general way of “expressing surprise, excitement, or admiration,” according to the American Dialect Society, who nominated it as one of their Words of the Year in 2023. Since then, though, it’s fair to say gyatt has taken on a life of its own.

According to research by Dictionary.com, in 2021 Twitch streamer YourRAGE began saying “gyatt” whenever a voluptuous female character appeared in a video game he was playing in front of his millions of followers. They were quick to pick up on the word, and before long, gyatt had fallen into similar use all over the internet as an expression of admiration on seeing a good-looking person. Now, however, the word has shifted again, so that in 2025 you’re just as likely to encounter it used as a noun as you are an exclamation: As a word in its own right, gyat or gyatt can now refer to either a particularly attractive person, or—given the appearance of the characters that originally inspired it—a person’s large backside. 

Lizard

Lizard (or as you might hear it, “lizard-lizard-lizard-lizard”) began life as a post-credits scene at the end of Disney’s 2025 movie Elio, promoting their 2026 movie Hoppers: The scene shows a green goggle-eyed lizard repeatedly and seemingly mindlessly hitting an emoji button on a screen that types out that emoji and says the word lizard aloud. After a green-screened version of the Hoppers lizard went viral on TikTok in the summer of 2025, both the video and its sound effect followed suit, and began to be used more loosely to draw attention to doing something repeatedly, mindlessly, or ineffectually—like hitting the button of a crosswalk despite it already being pressed, or clicking reload on a broken or slow-loading webpage. 

Mewing

From a Millennial-and-older perspective, perhaps one of the most bizarre online trends among Gen Z and Gen Alpha is looksmaxxing—a general term for anything from moisturizing and facial exercising (a.k.a. softmaxxing) to jawline implants and bone-shattering surgeries (or hardmaxxing) intended to improve a person’s physical appearance. From its somewhat questionable origins among the internet subcultures of the mid-2010s, looksmaxxing has become more mainstream in the 2020s, with some of its advocates now amassing millions of followers. At the same time, however, many big-name brands in the male self-improvement world—including Esquire and Men’s Health—have openly called out looksmaxxing, and countered its dangerous  hardmaxxing techniques with safer and sounder advice. One softmaxxing technique that has remained steadfastly popular online, though, is mewing.

If you think this might have something to do with cats, think again: Mewing is derived from the name of controversial British father-and-son orthodontists John and Mike Mew. Back in the 1980s, John Mew developed a series of facial exercises, dubbed orthotropics, that he believed could improve a person’s head posture, musculature, and attractiveness. Mewing is one of these techniques, and it has since gone viral online as a result of the looksmaxxing trend of the 2010s. It essentially involves pressing the tongue to the roof of the mouth and performing a series of jaw exercises that can, the Mews claim, improve the appearance of a “suboptimal” person.

It’s all fairy serious (and fairly scary) stuff, but in more recent years, mewing has gone in a rather unexpected direction and been repackaged as a running joke among Gen Alpha school kids. Since 2024, TikTok skits have shown kids in classrooms clenching their jaw and holding their finger to their lips when asked to contribute to class or answer a question, jokily implying that they can’t actually speak right now as they’re currently engaged in mewing. (Understandably, the joke hasn’t gone down well with teachers.) 

Steez

With ’90s fashions making a major comeback, it’s perhaps unsurprising that ’90s slang is coming back into fashion too. Steez started out in the early ’90s chiefly in hip-hop culture, and later biker and BMX culture. A playful extension of the word style (perhaps with a little ease thrown into the mix), it referred to a person’s fashionable appearance or breezy demeanor—and has been resurrected among Gen Alpha to describe a person’s sense of style or presence. 

Straight fire

Straight in this context is being used as an intensifier, to add a little emphasis (as it is in more familiar expressions like straight-up). Fire, meanwhile, can be used of anything impressive or awesome in 2020s slang—and so something that is straight fire is absolutely excellent. This term in particular went viral in the summer of 2025, when the principal of a high school in Gainesville, Georgia, filmed a back-to-school video built around teen slang. 

W in the chat

As modern as it might sound, W has been used as a slang abbreviation for a win for over 50 years—although nowadays it’s used not just of victories, but of anything that could be regarded as laudable or impressive. The addition of in the chat, though, is pure 2020s.

Chat in this instance refers is the comment section that typically accompanies live video broadcasts on platforms like Twitch, TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube premieres; if you get a W in the chat, you’ve said or done something in the live comments that’s likewise worthy of praise or respect from other viewers (while they in turn may well ask other people to “drop a W” as recognition of something excellent that someone else has done). Just like W before it, though, W in the chat has now begun to be used more broadly—and even in contexts where there is no live chat at all—to respond admiringly to something impressive done by someone else. 

What the sigma?!

If you thought alpha males were at the top of the tree, think again. While alphas are leaders, sigmas are the “lone wolves” that are seen as achieving everything on their own, with no overt reliance on anyone else. (Although why the 18th Greek letter sigma was chosen to describe this kind of character is unclear, it’s perhaps meant to emphasize the independence of this kind of character, set far apart from traditional alpha, beta, gamma ranking.)

In the 2010s, terms like alpha male and sigma male became hot topics among the controversial “masculinist subcultures” online. But more recently, online use of sigma, as Merriam-Webster has noted, has become increasingly ironic, pejorative, and jokey—eventually leading to a Squidward meme that went viral on TikTok in 2024, asking “What the sigma?!” Edits of the soundbite were liked and shared hundreds of thousands of times online, establishing this phrase in Gen Z and Gen Alpha vernacular as a 2020s equivalent of “What the heck?!” 

67

First, make sure you’re reading that right: It’s “six-seven,” not “sixty-seven.” Second, why on earth has a seemingly random number suddenly became Gen Alpha’s reply of choice?

The popularity of this one can be traced back to Doot Doot, a 2024 drill track by Philadelphia rapper Skrilla, which uses the numbers 6 and 7 as a repeated refrain. (Precisely what they’re meant to mean in the song is debatable, but suggestions range from Bible verses to police call signs, and a reference to 67th Street in Chicago.) Following its release last December, the track soon became a meme thanks to a viral edit of basketball player LaMelo Ball who, the video suggests, “moves like somebody who’s 6’1”–6’2”, except he’s 6’7”.” As that video and the thousands of edits it inspired became popular online, 67 became a snappy reply among Gen Zs and Gen Alphas that could mean—well, anything at all. In fact, just like last year’s viral sensation skibidi, 67 doesn’t really mean anything; it’s just a viral joke that’s run wild.