About Hipspeak

Welcome to Hipspeak, a weekly email that unpacks the slang your kids (or your coworkers) are already using — so you can keep up without cringing.

Each issue is one word: how it sounds, what it means in practice, an example in the wild, and a quick pop quiz. No homework. Just the Dictionary of Slang delivered to your inbox every Thursday.

What we publish

One entry a week. A pronunciation, a plain-English definition, a Think: line you can actually remember, an in-use example, and a quick quiz. We skip the 2,000-word origin essay. The publicly available word pages are the full record — browse them anytime in the archive.

How it works

Subscribe once, and a new word arrives each week. Subscribers can tap the heart on any word to save it to My words, and it follows you to any device you sign in on. Take the slang quiz when you want to check whether you're fluent or just vibing. Snooze and unsubscribe stay a click away in every email.

Who writes it

Ms. Lacey is your eyes and ears in real classrooms — decoding conversations that can sound like they were generated by a malfunctioning Wi-Fi router. Together with her (real, pseudonymized, human) students, she breaks down one word of Gen Z and Gen Alpha slang per issue.

If you've ever said “rad”, “sick”, or “talk to the hand”, you're in the right place. This is a judgement-free zone. The difference now is that younger speakers have built a linguistic alliance so dense a perfectly literate adult can feel like they walked into a conversation conducted entirely in code.

A note of caution: if you were not born in this century, don't try to adopt the slang as your own. In attempts to connect, you will appear beg and unc — stay tuned; we'll unpack those.

Who it's for

Parents, managers, and anyone who has nodded along in a conversation they did not fully understand. If you've ever googled a word after a group chat, you're in the right place.

Get in touch

Got a word we should unpack? Hit reply on any issue, or use the contact link below.