If you’ve spent more than five minutes near a 10-year-old lately, you’ve probably felt like you’re eavesdropping on a conversation from a different planet.
It’s not just that they’re using new words; it’s that the words themselves seem to have absolutely no tether to reality, like a massive inside joke that the rest of us weren’t invited to. You’ll hear them shouting about “skibidi” or “rizz” with a level of intensity that makes you wonder if you’ve actually had a stroke, only to realise it’s just the latest bit of internet brain-rot that’s bubbled up from TikTok.
It’s a strange, hyper-speed version of the slang we used to have, but because it moves so fast, it feels a lot more like a secret code than a way to actually communicate. To get a handle on what on earth they’re actually on about, you’ve got to look at the specific bits of nonsense that’ve become their new daily vocabulary.
Who exactly is Gen Alpha?
Generation Alpha refers to anyone born between 2010 and 2025, making the oldest of them around 15 right now. They’re the first generation to have grown up entirely in the digital age, surrounded by smartphones, TikTok, AI, short-form video and online gaming from the moment they were old enough to hold a tablet. Unlike every generation before them, whose slang developed in classrooms and on street corners and spread slowly outward,
Gen Alpha’s vocabulary is built almost entirely online and travels globally within days of being coined. One viral video can introduce a new word to millions of children simultaneously, which is why the slang changes fast enough that even Gen Z, who are only a few years older, often struggle to keep up. By the time most adults have worked out what something means, the children have frequently already moved on to something else.
“Brain rot”
Brain rot was named Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year in 2024 and is still very much in active use. It describes the state of mental deterioration that comes from consuming too much low-quality, mindless online content — the kind of chaotic, algorithmically driven short videos that children are watching in enormous quantities on a daily basis.
Gen Alpha uses it both as a genuine critique of content and as a badge of honour, cheerfully describing their own favourite videos as brain rot while watching more of them. It’s also used to describe the slang itself, which Gen Alpha finds funny rather than insulting. Even Pope Francis referenced the phrase in 2025 while urging young people to reduce their social media use, which tells you everything about how far it has travelled beyond its original context.
“Looksmaxxing”
Looksmaxxing is one of the more revealing terms on this list because it points to something real about how this generation thinks about appearance. It means taking deliberate, systematic steps to improve how you look: new haircut, skincare routine, diet, exercise, anything that moves the needle on attractiveness.
The term originated in online men’s communities in the early 2010s but has since been completely stripped of that context by Gen Alpha and repurposed as a fairly neutral self-improvement concept. Softmaxxing refers to low-effort changes like skincare and grooming, while hardmaxxing refers to more extreme interventions. Children as young as ten are using this word to describe their daily routines, which is one of the more interesting cultural shifts embedded in this otherwise silly-sounding vocabulary.
“Mewing”
Connected to looksmaxxing, mewing refers to a technique involving pressing your tongue flat against the roof of your mouth, supposedly to sharpen your jawline over time. It was coined by a controversial British dentist named John Mew and popularised by his son before spreading wildly on TikTok.
The scientific evidence for it doing anything useful is essentially nonexistent, but that hasn’t slowed its adoption at all. Children across the UK are genuinely practising this in classrooms and on public transport, often photographing their side profiles to track progress. It’s one of those terms that sounds absurd until you realise it describes a behaviour that’s actually happening at major scale.
“Mogging”
Mogging means outclassing someone else in terms of appearance, attractiveness or general presence — looking so good in comparison that the other person is effectively made invisible by the contrast. If you walk into a room, and you’re clearly the most attractive person there, you’re mogging everyone else. It comes from the acronym AMOG, meaning Alpha Male of the Group, and has roots in pick-up artist culture that Gen Alpha is completely unaware of.
It’s used relatively casually now as a way to describe any situation where someone is obviously outperforming those around them, not always about looks. The word has spawned a remarkable number of spin-offs including heightmogging, jawmogging and skinmogging, each referring to a specific physical feature being outclassed.
“Crash out”
Crash out means losing control of your emotions to the point of a complete meltdown. When someone crashes out, they’ve gone past the point of rational behaviour and are reacting in a way that’s visibly unhinged or disproportionate. It’s used both as a description of other people’s behaviour and, increasingly, as a first-person announcement of one’s own emotional state.
“I’m about to crash out” is essentially a warning that someone is at their limit. The phrase has become particularly common in discussions of reality TV, where contestants regularly provide excellent crash out material, but it filters down into everyday school life too. There’s a certain drama to it that appeals to the age group.
“NPC”
NPC stands for non-playable character, which in video game terms refers to the background characters controlled by the game itself rather than a human player. They follow predictable scripts, react the same way every time, and have no independent inner life. In Gen Alpha slang, calling someone an NPC means they’re basic, robotic, completely lacking in original thought, or just blindly following whatever everyone else is doing.
It’s one of the more cutting insults in the vocabulary because it implies the target isn’t even a real participant in their own life. There was also a brief TikTok trend in 2023 of people performing NPC behaviour on camera, moving jerkily and repeating phrases robotically, which spread the term further.
“Glazing”
Glazing means giving someone excessive, insincere flattery to the point where it becomes embarrassing. If you’re glazing someone, you’re praising them so much and so obviously that everyone around you can see you’re overdoing it. It’s essentially an updated version of brown-nosing, used to call out people who are being transparently sycophantic about a teacher, a content creator, or a more popular peer.
“Stop glazing him” is a fairly common phrase in Gen Alpha conversation. It was among the most searched slang terms of 2025 according to Google Trends data, which suggests it’s currently at the height of its mainstream moment.
“Menty b”
Menty b is a shortening of mental breakdown, used to describe either a genuine moment of overwhelm or, more often, a dramatically exaggerated one. “I’m having a menty b” can mean anything from actually struggling to mildly inconvenienced, delivered with varying degrees of irony.
It fits into a broader pattern in Gen Alpha slang where serious emotional states are named, compressed, and then deployed somewhat playfully, which is either a healthy coping mechanism or a way of avoiding taking feelings seriously depending on how generously you want to interpret it. Either way, you’ll hear it constantly among this age group when something goes even slightly wrong.
“Rizz”
Rizz is one of the older terms on this list but remains very much in use and shows no signs of disappearing. It means charisma—specifically the natural, almost effortless ability to attract other people or make a strong impression. Someone with rizz makes flirting look easy and social situations look effortless. Someone with no rizz struggles visibly with both.
The word has spawned an extensive family of derivatives including W rizz (good charisma), L rizz (bad charisma), unspoken rizz (someone who attracts people without even saying anything), and rizzler, which refers to someone who is exceptionally skilled at deploying it. Linguists have noted it as one of the Gen Alpha terms with the best chance of sticking around long-term because it genuinely fills a gap in everyday language.
“Aura”
Aura is a running score of someone’s coolness, social power and general energy. You gain aura points by doing something impressive, funny or socially confident, and lose them by doing something embarrassing, cringe or socially misjudged. It’s essentially a gamification of social status applied to real life, which makes perfect sense coming from a generation raised on games with experience points and achievement systems.
Falling over in public costs you aura. A brilliant comeback earns you some back. Having a negative aura means you’re giving off bad energy and are generally considered draining to be around. The term is used both seriously and ironically, often in the same conversation.
“Skibidi”
Skibidi is the term that perhaps best captures the pure absurdism of Gen Alpha slang. It comes from a deeply strange YouTube animated series called Skibidi Toilet, in which toilets with human heads sticking out of the bowl wage war against humanoid figures with cameras for heads. The word itself can mean something is cool, something is bad, something is weird, or absolutely nothing at all depending on the context and tone.
Children use it as a greeting, a filler, a reaction, or just something to shout in a quiet moment. Merriam-Webster has described it as sitting firmly in the category of humour rather than genuine linguistic innovation, which is perhaps the most measured possible response to a word whose primary cultural contribution is making adults profoundly confused.
Why it moves so fast
Source: Unsplash The reason Gen Alpha slang feels so relentlessly difficult to keep up with is structural rather than deliberate. TikTok’s algorithm rewards novelty, and children consuming hours of short-form content daily are exposed to new phrases constantly. A word can travel from a single video to being used in playgrounds across multiple countries within a week, which means the lifecycle of any given term is way shorter than it would have been for any previous generation.
The slang isn’t designed to last; it’s designed to signal membership in a moment, and once the moment passes, so does the word. The cycle is only going to accelerate as this generation gets older and the platforms they use get faster.
