Gen Z Slang 2025: 14 Words, What They Really Mean, and How to Use Them
NEWS | 10 October 2025
lighning bolt icon An icon in the shape of a lightning bolt. lighning bolt icon An icon in the shape of a lightning bolt. Impact Link This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now. Keeping up with the terms your Gen Z coworker is using can feel like a full-time job of its own. While they might poke fun at you for your outdated slang — not very "groovy" of them — younger generations are just doing what every generation before them has done: evolving language. Sometimes, this just looks like repeating words and phrases without being overly discerning about where they came from. "The internet is just one big gigantic seventh grade where you are looking for the coolest kid and you're going to follow what they do without thinking real hard," Jessi Grieser, an associate professor of linguistics at the University of Michigan, told Business Insider. "The issue that we're coming into now," Grieser said, "is that it's a little easier for those insider terms to escape and eventually become separated from the group in such a way that we sometimes don't notice that that word originally came from there." This sometimes results in words and phrases that originated in Black and LGBTQ+ communities being adapted by broader audiences, and often developing new meanings altogether. While the process of word adoption is the same as it has always been with previous generations, Grieser said, the speed at which it's happening is what sets the internet generations apart from their older counterparts. And although you might not know exactly what some of Gen Z's words mean, chances are they aren't using them to make fun of you, Kelly Wright, an assistant professor of linguistics at the University of Wisconsin—Madison, told Business Insider. "Just look up 'cringe' and try not to be that," Wright said. Here are 14 slang terms from Gen Z — defined by the Pew Research Center as people born between 1997 and 2012 — that will help you not feel so out of the loop in 2025.
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