KYM Review: The Top Slang Terms Of 2024

Internet slang entered a new phase of being in 2024 with sleeper hit slang terms from niche online and IRL communities seeping into the mainstream at regular intervals throughout the year. The ever-flattering internet landscape has never been more riddled with normies, and it's starting to show in our digital vernacular.

The past year saw three powerful online communities come together to dominate popular slang on the internet: Black AAVE speakers, Stan Twitter girls and gays, and fratty Zynternet operators.

The resulting effect on the internet slang landscape has been deadly. Pop singers are being placed in "Khia asylums" after one bad streaming week, kids as young as 18 are worried about losing their "aura" and reaching "unc status," and millennials are being forced to explain what "hawk tuah" means to their parents over Thanksgiving.

Here's your best shot at grasping what each of these terms means in Know Your Meme's 2024 slang roundup.

Hawk Tuah

In possibly the most dizzying ascent to mainstream fame ever seen on the internet, Haliey Welch, better known as the "Hawk Tuah Girl," absolutely dominated internet slang in 2024.

In a street interview video that has gathered over 400,000 likes and tens of millions of views since it was first posted this June, Welch is asked, "What's one move in bed that makes a man go crazy every time?" to which she responds, "Oh, you gotta give him that hawk tuah and spit on that thang! You get me?"

It's impossible to overstate the impact Hawk Tuah had on internet culture in general, much less internet slang. To the chronically online internet veteran, Welch's video was not unlike any number of drunk street interviews posted online every day. But to the sports-minded, Burnerverse indoctrinated, Zynternet user, "hawk tuah" quickly became the line of the century.

The phrase also spawned idioms that sounded older than the people using them, with one very popular example being, "If she don't hawk tuah, I don't wanna talk tuah."

The fame from this one video landed Welch the opportunity to make concert appearances, host her own Talk Tuah podcast and even create her very own meme coin that ultimately ended up becoming one of the biggest crypto scandals of the year.

The socio-political impact of Hawk Tuah on the internet slang landscape is a still-developing story, but for its undeniable impact on internet memes this past year, the phrase takes the top spot in KYM's 2024 slang roundup.

Demure

"Demure" was another normie sleeper hit this year, emerging from the potent hive mind of TikTok. TikToker Jools Lebron, aka @joolieannie, posted a series of ironic videos about how to look "demure" and "mindful" at the workplace in August, causing many young women across the world to short-circuit immediately.

https://www.tiktok.com/embed/v2/7399736793119247662

https://www.tiktok.com/embed/v2/7401140164887678238

As one Twitter user put it, "I can always tell when there's a new tiktok buzzword because I saw 73 tweets with the word 'demure' in it today." The internet attention economy thrived on such slang pump and dump schemes in 2024, with videos and memes using the phrase spiking in August and September and seeing a sharp fall-off as the winter months closed in.

The tail end of the "demure" trend was like walking out of the club into the harsh light of day. Brands had picked up on the meme at lightning speeds, and social media interns had embroiled themselves in battles that were never that serious to begin with.

The voracious response to the word "demure" produced in 2024 has earned it a solid slot in this year's list.

https://t.co/pC48QHDjP0 pic.twitter.com/MDFafyghsI

— TeamSpeak (@teamspeak) August 12, 2024

Aura

Teens on the internet were obsessed with the idea of having "aura" this year, which seemed to be emblematic of a lean toward mysticism and "vibes" on the internet in 2024. Having "aura" means having unspoken, effortless and undeniable swag. It means that you give off an energy that radiates before you even speak.

The term was first popularized in soccer communities around the year 2022, with sports fans regularly commending Liverpool center-back Van Djik for his "aura" on the field. As 2024 rolled around, discussions about celebrities with the most aura took centerstage, even as goofy schoolkids exchanged jokes about using their undeniable aura on lesser NPCs.

@haskell_rzz I dont like using it too often #trending #haskell_rz #jokes #virall #aura Creds to the boys @L🦇 @Leek ♬ original sound – Trxy!

From aura came meme trends like "Aura Points" and jokes about using one's aura to nuke a "Level 1 Crook."

The joking attempts to quantify the unquantifiable substance that one's "aura" led to some of the internet's funniest memes in 2024. For that reason, "aura" makes the cut in this year's slang roundup.

Khia

American rapper Khia caught one of the biggest strays of the century with this Stan Twitter meme in which pop fans literally use her name to say that someone is outdated, out of touch and totally in their "flop era."

If you are over the age of 20, you might know Khia from her legendary song "My Neck, My Back." But for many K-pop fans, Khia is best known for featuring in an obscure Stan Twitter meme in which an Asian girl looks absolutely gassed to meet her.

By 2023, Khia's name started getting thrown around on the regular — people were jokingly calling pop stars any lesser than T-Swift herself "Khias," and saying that they needed to be thrown into (or break out of) the "Khia Asylum," a make-believe prison where pop singers go to live out their careers in obscurity.

Not everyone was happy about Khia's name being used to mean "flop," but knowing how vicious parts of Stan Twitter can be, one can argue that the rapper got off rather easy.

For deeply influencing how the pop music fandom talks about their favorite artist's success (or lack thereof), "Khia" makes the cut in this year's slang editorial.

Freaky

While it's true that 𝓯𝓻𝓮𝓪𝓴𝔂 memes did spawn in their niche Hood Irony subreddits in 2023, the word itself didn't really hit terminal velocity until 2024.

"Freaky ahh" memes were a spin-off of the Papyrus and Rio de Janeiro side of Instagram, words that we promise make sense if you are under the age of 20 or if you hit the Galaxy Gas on the regular.

Freaky memes are exactly how they sound, vaguely lewd jokes that make liberal use of the tongue emoji alongside a whole cohort of over-edited moldy meme staples.

Freaky memes involved people editing normal jokes to be a tad more suggestive and also gave rise to freak-adjacent memes like Freakbob, a freaky-deakier version of the beloved Nickelodeon cartoon.

For effectively replacing the word "zesty" in the Zoomer vernacular, the term "freaky" earns another of our coveted spots in the 2024 slang list.

Brain Rot / Slop / Lobotomy

A truly deranged side effect of intra-fandom meme culture in 2024 was the rise of brain rot lobotomy-core slop content.

All three of these slang terms refer to a different side of low-brow meme culture, but they come together to create a potent strain of sh*tposts that redefines the term entirely.

The key distinction between the three terms is their usage. Brain rot memes are those with no real artistic or substantive value, with the implication being that engaging with these memes may actually rot your brains.

Slop content is typically used to describe brain rot material that's produced on a larger scale, like AI-generated Facebook images.

Lobotomy memes are also similar to brain rot memes, except that they typically refer to an intra-fandom meme trend like Lobotomy Kaisen or Lobotomy Dash.

For being emblematic of how internet visual content and meme culture has evolved in the age of AI-enabled content generation, the words brain rot, lobotomy and slop have made their way into this year's slang roundup.

Unc

No internet slang editorial is complete without the random AAVE term that a bunch of younger TikTokers adopted and immediately ran into the ground. Jokes about men hitting the wall and reaching "unc status" ballooned online, effectively mirroring the Ok Boomer trends of the late 2010s.

Unc is a pretty intuitive slang term, and it has long been used in Black communities to refer to an older member of someone's family or community. On the internet in 2024, however, the term "unc" came to mean growing out-of-touch or simply adopting unc-like behaviors, like telling the little cousins to stop running around the darn house.

Memes about reaching unc status were exacerbated by viral videos like the one featuring the "I Ain't Fresh?" Whattaburger Unc, who got his outfit roasted on video only for the internet to rally behind him.

Over on TikTok, "Yes Unc" became a viral spam comment used to mock lame and corny sketch comedy posted by older content creators. The term unc has earned a solid spot in this year's top slang for saturating young adult internet communities and presenting a truly novel way to hate on oldheads.

Brat

"Brat" may be the single most impactful slang term on this year's roundup, and it's not just because the album freed Charli XCX from the Khia Asylum this year. Brat was arguably the biggest pop album of 2024, and it was also infamous for getting swept up in the political cringe-fest that gave rise to the sentence "Kamala is brat."

There's no end to the number of think pieces written about the Brat album and how it was co-opted into the political milieu in 2024, but there may be a way to boil down the essence of the term.

In Charli's own words, a girl is "brat" when she "has a breakdown, but kind of like parties through it." "Brat" represents the brash, volatile and hedonistic woman who throws caution to the wind, no matter what.

This meant that 2024 was dubbed the year of the "Brat Summer," with people pointing out the album's signature green apple hue with glee every chance they got and embracing their wild side, no matter how cringe or self-serving they seemed.

Brat was truly inescapable for a vast majority of this year, and for that reason, the term has made the cut in this year's roundup.

Huzz / -Uzz

No internet slang list written in the early 2020s is complete without a reference to the Twitch streamer Kai Cenat, who pioneered a number of slang terms that topped last year's roundup.

This includes infamous words like "gyatt" and "rizz." This year, Kai Cenat's posse popularized the word "huzz," which loosely translates to "hoes" or the more polite, "women."

Kai Cenat's constantly talking about "rizzing up the huzz" and doing anything to impress the huzz. The running gag hit peak velocity when pop star Tyla made an appearance on his stream and effectively made him go nonverbal. Since then, jokes about greeting and impressing the huzz became commonplace on TikTok.

The word also inspired its own "-uzz" suffix slang trend, with "bruzz" (bros) and "chuzz" (chopped or ugly) becoming a part of slang overload memes in late 2024.

https://www.tiktok.com/embed/v2/7417221250134691114

https://www.tiktok.com/embed/v2/7437222988325391658

Honorable Mentions

To round off our 2024 slang roundup list, we're going to pay tribute to some key slang terms that may have gained traction this year, even if they didn't make a splash quite large enough to warrant a standalone feature.

"Geeked" was a solid runner-up in the 2024 slang list, following the terms meme-troduction through the "We Geek Hard" meme trend of 2023. A term that loosely translated to "riled up" or under the influence, staying "geeked up" usually means that you're "genuinely tweaking" and might need to take a chill pill.

The word "crashout" belongs in the same family of tweak-adjacent slang and comes from AAVE slang from the Baton Rouge area of Louisiana. A crashout, essentially, is a reckless individual who is constantly itching for a fight.

"Crashing out" is, in a sense, the violent male version of flopping. It's a messy, public affair that no one wants to find themselves in the middle of.

Finally, the last word to receive an honorary mention in the 2024 slang list is "Diddy," an unfortunate development in the year's dictionary. "Diddy" refers to the rapper and record executive by the same name who was arrested in 2024 for a plethora of allegedly egregious crimes against numerous people. "Diddy" has become synonymous with "creep" or "nonce" on the internet. You might even find the phrase "Nice try Diddy" spammed in internet ads that people want to push out of the algorithm.

---

Looking for more of this year's best viral phenomena and memes? Be sure to check out our other 2024 meme roundups below:

• The Top 20 Memes Of 2024 — Coming soon…
• KYM Staff Picks Of 2024 — Coming soon…
• Top Slang Terms Of 2024
• Top Gaming Memes Of 2024
• Top Trolls, Rumors and Hoaxes Of 2024
• Wackiest Stories Of 2024 — Coming soon…
• Top Viral Videos Of 2024 — Coming soon…
• Top Anime Memes Of 2024 — Coming soon…