Who Let the Dad In?
Hi, I'm Andy. I'm a dad in North Carolina. I have a 6th grader and a 9th grader.
My daughter uses words my son says are already dead. My son uses words I'm pretty sure he made up. They both agree on one thing: I should never, under any circumstances, try to use their slang.
So naturally, I built a whole website about it.
Why Does This Exist?
It started when my daughter said something was “giving sigma” and my son physically cringed. I asked what that meant. They both looked at me like I'd asked them to explain the internet to a Victorian-era child.
I realized there was a whole language happening around me that I didn't speak. And worse, some of the words I thought I knew were apparently already “dead” and using them made me look like I was, quote, “trying too hard, Dad.”
So I did what any reasonable Xennial software developer would do: I built a searchable, filterable, cringe-scored dictionary of teen slang with a translation engine. You know, normal dad stuff. (Xennial: born roughly 1977-1985. Too young for Gen X cynicism, too old for Millennial optimism. The Oregon Trail generation. Analog childhoods, digital adulthoods, and still processing it.)
How It Works
The dictionary is built from multiple sources. Urban Dictionary, Reddit, TikTok trends, YouTube explainer videos, and good old fashioned eavesdropping on my kids' group chats (with permission, mostly).
Each term gets a cringe score (how embarrassing it would be for you to use it), an age tier (which generation actually uses it), and a status (is it rising, peaking, or already dead).
The translator lets you type normal English and see what it would sound like in brainrot speak, or paste something your kid texted and decode it into actual English.
Is This Accurate?
I try. The dictionary gets updated weekly and I cross-reference multiple sources. But slang moves fast and accuracy in this space is... aspirational.
If you're a teen reading this and something is wrong, I apologize. Also, how did you find your parent's browsing history? That's actually impressive.
The Real Point
This site is a joke. But it's also not. Language is fascinating, and watching it evolve in real time through internet culture is genuinely cool. Every generation invents new ways to communicate, and every previous generation is confused by it. That's not new. That's just how language works.
The difference now is that slang cycles happen in months instead of years, and a word can go from unknown to universal to dead before you finish reading this sentence. That's wild. And kind of beautiful. And also very confusing for those of us who still remember when “sick” meant you had a fever.
I'm a Dad First
The whole point of this site is to know the slang. To embarrass your kids when it's called for. To make them cringe. To have fun with it.
But some of these terms come from corners of the internet that aren't fun. And I think it's just as important to know those ones too, so you can figure out if there's anything to actually worry about, and help your kid if there is. I've flagged those terms so you can spot them, and I've tried to give you honest, non-panicky guidance about what they mean.
I'm not a therapist or a child psychologist. I'm just a dad trying to keep up. If you're genuinely concerned about your kid, talk to a professional. Not a joke website run by a guy in North Carolina.
Tech Stack
Built with Next.js, Tailwind CSS, and Supabase. Deployed on Vercel. Data scraped from the internet and processed by AI (which is somehow both on-brand and off-brand for a dad project).