90s slang gave us “as if,” “talk to the hand,” “da bomb” and a sarcastic “NOT!” at the end of every other sentence. A lot of it came from hip-hop, sitcoms and teen movies, and some of it never really left. This guide explains each word in plain English, with a full entry for each, plus a few older classics and early-2000s words that belong to the same family.

Praise: when something was great

• Phat: excellent; a deliberate respelling of “fat.”
• Da bomb: the best, the coolest.
• All that: impressive, or so they think. Add “and a bag of chips” for extra.
• Off the hook: amazing, wild, incredibly fun.
• Props: respect or credit, as in “props to you.”

Comebacks and put-downs

• As if: “no way,” with an eye roll, made famous by Clueless.
• Talk to the hand: “I’m not listening,” palm out.
• Whatever: the ultimate shrug, sometimes with a W hand sign.
• NOT!: tacked onto a sentence to flip it into its opposite.
• Psych: “just kidding, gotcha,” also spelled sike.
• Wack: bad, lame, disappointing.
• Scrub: a guy who brings nothing to the table, thanks to TLC.

Celebrating

• Booyah: a shout of triumph.
• Raise the roof: celebrate loudly, and the palms-up dance move that went with it.

Words from the ballroom scene

• Shade: a subtle, cutting insult.
• Read: to call someone out sharply and accurately.

Both came from Black and Latino LGBTQ ballroom culture and reached a much wider audience through the 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning.

Older slang that never went away

• Attaboy and attagirl: “nice job!”, from around 1910.
• Zonked: exhausted, a 1950s Americanism.
• Airhead: a scatterbrained person, from the late 1970s.
• Artsy-fartsy: pretentiously artistic, also from the late 1970s.
• Agita: stress you feel in your stomach, Italian-American style.
• A game: your best performance.
• Ankle-biter: a small child.

Into the 2000s

• Awkward turtle: the hand gesture for painfully awkward moments.
• Amazeballs: amazing, said with a wink.
• Anywho: a playful “anyway.”
• Y2K: the look of around 2000: chrome, butterfly clips and low-rise jeans.

Where 90s slang came from

Much of it started in hip-hop and Black American speech (phat, wack, props) and then spread through TV, film and music. Martin popularized “talk to the hand,” Wayne’s World made “NOT!” a catchphrase, Clueless gave us the definitive “As if!”, ESPN’s Stuart Scott took “booyah” mainstream, and TLC’s “No Scrubs” put “scrub” at No. 1 in 1999.

Plenty of it lives on in new forms. “Fire” and “goated” do the job “da bomb” used to, and “jk” has replaced the dramatic “NOT!”. Some words, like props and whatever, simply never left.

For newer words, see our Gen Z slang guide, Gen Alpha slang, or the full A–Z index.