If you have to ask what it means to be cool, well, you probably aren’t cool. What is cool, though, is just how many slang words we’ve used over the years to talk about people and things that we think are fab, funky, fresh, groovy, fly, phat, lit, gnarly, rad, and the cat’s meow. And that is just a taste of the coolness we managed to find over the years. We looked for as many interesting slang words that mean cool as we possibly could, and we gathered them up into one of the (dare we say it?) coolest lists you’ll find anywhere.
Warning: using many of these words without first consulting a TikTok influencer or professional jazz musician will most likely make you sound, well, the opposite of cool.
The distant past
bully
The word bully was a noted favorite of president Theodore Roosevelt, but it dates as far back as the plays of William Shakespeare. Bully!
beneship
This is another really old word, traced back to at least the 1560s. Most sources attribute it to an old cant, a language used by thieves and criminals.
splendacious, splendidous, and splendidious
These more intense versions of the word splendid emerged in the 1500s and managed to stick around for quite a while.
dandy
We’ve reached the late 1700s with the word dandy. Dandy was used as an adjective to describe something that a dandy, a fashionable man about town, would like.
swell
Moving on to the 1800s, we have swell. This word was used to describe something that is fashionable and showy, like a flashy rich person.
smashing, smacking, cracking, slapping, and twanging
Perhaps it was a popular trend in older times to imply that something cool was likely to hit something, as this group of action-packed adjectives suggests.
fly
It may seem like the word fly is several hundred years too early on this list, but fly has been used to describe the cool and fashionable since at least the 1700s (“a fly white petticoat”).
hot
The slang hot has oxymoronically referred to things that are “really cool” since even before the 20th century. In all that time, hot has somehow never managed to cool off.
The turn of the century
bee’s knees
During the early 1900s, people began to use animal anatomy to describe cool things. While bee’s knees has stuck around a bit, other phrases such as eel’s hips, frog’s eyebrows, and the antelope’s tonsils sadly have been mostly lost to time.
cat’s meow and cat’s pajamas
This purr-fect pair of terms shows that we have linked cats with coolness for quite some time. Later, jazz slang would cut out the middleman (middlecat?) and use the word cat to refer to a cool person.
it
In the early 1900s, if someone was it or had it, you just knew they were cool. Even today coolness is often seen as that indescribable “it” you just can’t put your finger on.
hip
The slang hip for “cool” is pretty old and seems to be linked to the even older practice of smoking. The slang hip referred to opium smokers relaxing on their hip—while being really cool, of course.
kif or kiff
Speaking of smoking, the South African slang kiff or kif comes from a nickname for the cannabis plant. This slang seems to have originated from the Arabic kaif, meaning “pleasure.”
bodacious
The slang bodacious is a combination of the words bold and audacious. While bodacious emerged in the early 1900s, it would come back in style much later during the 1980s.
The ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s
tops
In the 1930s, if something was cool it was tops or the tops. Even back then, you had to work to remain at the peak of coolness.
groovy
The ’30s and ’40s brought us the adjective groovy, which would remain cool for a few more decades. Weirdly, the word groovy was also used as a slang term for someone who was not cool–because they didn’t do drugs.
righteous
Speaking of staying cool over several decades, the slang righteous took off in the 1940s to describe things—especially drugs—that were the epitome of cool.
ginchy
Bringing in the 1950s, we have ginchy. This slang term seems to have derived from the noun ginch, which referred to an attractive woman.
boss
Though this word was popularized in the 1950s and 1960s, we have evidence that cool things have been referred to as boss as far back as the 1800s.
The ’60s and ’70s
in
If you were cool in the 1960s, you were in. This is yet another example of a slang term that we can actually trace back hundreds of years.
far out
You can thank hippie culture for making this one (and many other terms) popular. The slang far out referred to the out-of-this-world feeling a person gets when they… do cool things that hippies do.
kickin’
Speaking of the cool things hippies did, the slang kickin’ may also have been inspired by the strong kick a person gets from… the stuff that hippies liked.
fab
Short for fabulous, the slang fab was popularized in the 1960s by a somewhat popular band named after insects. The Beatles were given their nickname “The Fab Four” by their publicist in the early 1960s and the slang fab has stuck around ever since.
funky
The funk music of the 1960s is pretty cool, so it should come as no surprise that the slang adjective funky also describes something that’s well liked.
zooly
One of the weirder words on this list, zooly had a hot minute in the early 1960s. Like a cool stranger, we don’t know where it came from, and it didn’t stick around all that long.
awesome
The slang awesome gained favor among cool teens in the 1970s. However, it would become more popular in the late 1980s and early 1990s after being used by a crime-fighting team of masked, pizza-loving teenage reptiles. Speaking of which…
radical
The slang radical and the shorter rad emerged as surfer jargon during the 1970s. Like awesome, both of these terms would really take off with assistance from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoons, which relied on the cool slang of earlier decades.
The end of the 20th century
fresh
In the 1980s fresh became a generic slang term of approval. One of its early adopters was Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five, who used it in “She’s Fresh” (1982) and other songs.
wicked, sick, ill, killer, vicious, and gnarly
These words have been used throughout the later 1900s to refer to cool things. They are good examples of how commonly negative words are flipped into positive terms, a process linguists call amelioration.
chill
It is pretty strange that it took until the late 1980s for the frosty word chill to be used as a slang synonym of cool. This word emerged from Black slang, which is something we could also say about many of the words on this list.
tight
The slang tight was also popular in the Black community in the 1980s, but it is yet another slang word we find evidence of hundreds of years before it became cool.
stellar
We had far out in the 1960s, and the 1980s gave us stellar. It is an appropriate slang word to describe things that are so cool that they are out of this world.
phat
In the 1990s, phat came to be used as a synonym for cool. However, phat was used in even earlier years to describe attractive women, leading to (unsupported) theories that phat stands for “pretty hips and thighs” or “pretty hot and tempting.”
dope and dank
We’ve already seen a number of cool slang terms that were inspired by feel-good smoking, and the ’90s keep up the trend with the slang pair of dank and dope.
baller
A baller can refer to a great basketball player or a lavishly successful person. It can also describe someone or something as “excellent,” especially in some spectacular way. Baller is predominantly used in the worlds of sports and hip-hop, but it has spread into the culture at large.
sweet
Sweet really took off in the 1990s, but it had been used off and on throughout the 20th century. We can even find evidence of its usage dating back to the early 1800s.
bangin’, the bomb (da bomb), off the hook
This trio of terms exploded in use during the 1990s. Kriss Kross released “Da Bomb” in 1993, and now the phrase is remembered as a relic of that era. As you may know, off the hook has had many different variations, including off the hizzy and off the heezy.
all that, all that and a bag of chips
Teenagers got a lot of mileage out of the slang all that in the 1990s, as it was also the name of a popular comedy show on Nickelodeon. The more intense all that and a bag of chips actually transforms into all that and a bag of crisps when used in the UK.
gucci
The slang gucci hit the scene in the late ’80s and ’90s. As the fashion experts among us already know, this slang word refers to the Italian luxury brand Gucci.
The new millennium
mint
Although it predates this era, the slang mint took off in the early 2000s. This slang refers to someone or something that’s perfect (mint condition) like an unused car or toy still in the box.
poppin’
The slang sense of poppin’ meaning “cool” and “popular” seems to have emerged in the mid-2000s. Artists like Lil Mama and T.I. helped this one take off.
lit
The slang lit was everywhere in the 2010s, becoming a particularly common word in hip-hop. Interestingly, lit was also used as a slang term to mean “drunk” or “intoxicated” in the early 1900s.
fire, straight fire
We go from lit to fire, another red-hot slang term from the 2010s. Is it possible the modern fire was inspired by the older phrase on fire (in use since the late 1980s)?
legit
In the 2010s, the slang legit was a synonym for cool, but this term has had a number of different meanings over the years. In the past, it has been used to describe someone worthy of respect or extremely talented.
on fleek
The slang on fleek was coined in 2014 on Vine. Also, you now remember Vine was a thing. While Vine has been long dead, on fleek has managed to stick around in the 2020s.
Take the quiz
Think you’re the coolest cat around? Try our quiz about the many slang words for “cool” and see how lit and legit your lexicon is! For extra practice check out our dandy wordlist of cool words.
