The Evolution of Internet Slang and What It Says About Us

There was a time when typing “LOL” felt revolutionary. The turn of the millennium brought us “BRB,” “AIM away messages,” and the dawn of instant messaging culture. Fast-forward to 2024, and the pace of linguistic evolution has become almost incomprehensible. A single TikTok video can launch a term into global consciousness overnight. According to recent data, “demure” saw a 1200% increase in usage in digital web media alone after content creator Jools Lebron redefined the term from its traditional meaning of reserved or modest to refined and sophisticated. This transformation happened in mere months, a velocity of linguistic change that would have been impossible in the pre-internet era.

Internet slang has transcended its humble origins as casual shorthand between tech enthusiasts. It’s now a complex, multifaceted reflection of how we communicate, connect, and construct identity in an increasingly digital world. Understanding this evolution isn’t just about staying current with what Gen Z is saying—it reveals profound truths about how technology reshapes language, culture, and the way generations define themselves against one another.

From Digital Shorthand to Cultural Currency

The Early Internet: Efficiency Meets Personality

Internet slang didn’t emerge from a desire to sound cool. It was born from necessity. In the 1990s and early 2000s, internet users faced real technical constraints. Typing on slow connections, limited character counts, and the social awkwardness of synchronous communication all created pressure to develop linguistic shortcuts. “LOL” (laugh out loud), “BRB” (be right back), and “ROFL” (rolling on the floor laughing) weren’t trendy—they were practical solutions.

But something interesting happened alongside this efficiency. These abbreviations became markers of digital belonging. If you knew what “ROFLMAO” meant, you were part of an exclusive club. This dual purpose—efficiency plus identity signaling—would become the foundation of all internet slang that followed.

The Social Media Explosion: Speed Meets Scale

The landscape transformed dramatically as social media emerged. According to Statista, social media users grew from 2.79 billion in 2014 to 5.22 billion in 2024, representing 63.8% of the world’s population. This explosive growth fundamentally changed how slang spreads and evolves. What once took years to permeate a culture could now happen in days or hours.

Platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and particularly TikTok created a new ecosystem where language became hyper-visual and performance-based. Slang wasn’t just written anymore—it was spoken, danced, memed, and remixed. Tony Thorne, Director of the Slang and New Language Archive at King’s College, explains that once “authentic conversations and personal interactions began to feature on the internet and in messaging and on microblogging platforms, language novelties, slang and faddish usages crossed over from a private realm into the global public domain.”

The speed differential became almost unmanageable. Whereas millennials experienced the rise and fall of slang terms over years, Gen Z cycles through them in months. According to GIPHY’s 2025 Trend Forecast, the reign of millennial slang is officially coming to an end, replaced by Gen Z’s unique, chaotic, and decidedly less linear approach to online language. Terms like “vibes,” “lol,” and “adulting” now feel dated—relics of a slower internet era.

The Anatomy of Modern Viral Slang

Case Study: “Demure” and the TikTok Effect

To understand how internet slang works today, we need to look at specific examples. Consider “demure,” perhaps the defining slang term of 2024. The word itself isn’t new—it’s been in English for centuries, meaning modest or reserved. But in August 2024, something shifted.

Content creator Jools Lebron posted a series of TikTok videos applying makeup, working at a job, and preparing for travel—all while describing her actions as “demure,” “mindful,” and “expensive.” She wasn’t defining a new term so much as recontextualizing an existing one. The TikTok videos went viral, and “demure” became the most searched slang word of 2024, ultimately named Dictionary.com’s Word of the Year.

What makes this case particularly revealing is the anatomy of its success. It wasn’t a random creation. It was strategic, intentional, and deeply tied to aesthetic philosophy. The term resonated because it captured something people were already feeling—a shift toward quiet confidence and understated elegance. Jools Lebron simply provided the language for it.

The Role of Authenticity and Creator Culture

Modern viral slang rarely succeeds through artificial marketing. It requires authenticity. Content creators are the driving forces behind evolutions in mainstream slang, from big names like Kai Cenat to lesser-known accounts behind viral social media posts. These creators don’t invent language in a vacuum; they tap into genuine sentiment and give it a memorable, quotable form.

This is where internet slang differs fundamentally from corporate attempts to co-opt youth language. Brands that try to “do fellow kids” by using slang typically fail spectacularly because they misunderstand the underlying social contract. Slang succeeds when it feels organic, when it emerges from real communities and real conversations before spreading outward.

What 2024’s Slang Reveals About Us

Generational Anxiety Encoded in Language

Oxford University Press named “brainrot” its 2024 Word of the Year—a term referring to the negative effects of being too steeped in social media and internet culture. The choice is telling. It suggests a collective anxiety about technology consumption that’s finally entered mainstream consciousness.

But here’s what’s interesting: Gen Z didn’t invent “brainrot” to describe a problem they want to solve. They invented it to describe a condition they accept as inevitable. It’s the linguistic embodiment of resigned acceptance. There’s an almost darkly humorous tone to the term. Unlike previous generations’ moral panics about technology, Gen Z treats cultural degradation from excessive online consumption as simply “the way things are.”

Similarly, terms like “delulu” (slang for delusional) and others represent “the elevating of an older concept or cliche into a teasing provocation or pretense at new insights.” These terms allow speakers to acknowledge cognitive distortions while maintaining ironic distance from them. It’s a form of self-aware coping.

Identity and The Exhausting Acceleration of Coolness

One particularly revealing phenomenon is how rapidly slang becomes uncool once it reaches mainstream awareness. A high school teacher reportedly banned certain terms from her classroom, including “rizz,” “gucci,” and “sigma,” demonstrating how quickly slang moves from underground to embarrassingly mainstream.

This acceleration mirrors the fundamental economics of online identity. If slang serves as a marker of belonging to a specific group, then its value diminishes the moment outsiders adopt it. This creates a constant pressure to innovate. As linguistics professor Adam Cooper explains, the internet facilitates the “expiration date” of slang terms—as awareness increases and extends to those outside the groups that use them, they lose their potency, and new terms emerge to replace them.

Gen Alpha now mocks Gen Z’s vocabulary as outdated while Gen Z dismisses millennial speech as cringe. It’s a generational pecking order maintained through linguistic gatekeeping.

The Platform-Specific Fragmentation of Slang

Discord, TikTok, Twitter: Each Platform Its Own Dialect

Modern slang doesn’t exist in a single unified space. Terms linked to group chat culture, such as “gm chat” (good morning chat) and “gn chat” (good night chat), saw massive growth in 2024, confirming the importance of private digital communities in building popular phrases. These communities act as incubation spaces where new language is tested, refined, and eventually released into broader culture.

The journey typically follows this pattern: A term emerges in a Discord server or group chat. It gains traction in specific sub-communities. Someone with a large TikTok following uses it authentically in their content. The algorithm amplifies it. Suddenly, it’s everywhere. But this process moves so fast that by the time the mainstream discovers the term, early adopters have already moved on to something new.

The Global Dimension: English-Centric but Not Exclusively

While English-language slang dominates global discourse, slang innovation is far from monolingual. Languages worldwide are experiencing similar phenomena. Young people everywhere are creating compact, evocative terms that encode complex social realities in memorable phrases.

This represents a fascinating moment in linguistic history. For the first time, slang innovation across different languages is occurring simultaneously and with visibility to one another. A term that works in one language often gets borrowed, adapted, or recreated in others.

The Psychological and Social Functions of Slang

Belonging and Exclusion

At its core, slang serves a tribal function. Speaking the slang of your generation or community signals membership. You understand the references, the contexts, the layered meanings. You’re in the know. Those who don’t understand? They’re outsiders—older, less tuned in, not part of the group.

This function hasn’t changed since slang first emerged. What’s changed is the velocity and visibility. Your parents’ slang confusion is no longer private; it’s publicly documented on social media platforms where millions can watch generational discord play out in real time.

Expressing the Inexpressible

Slang doesn’t exist just to exclude. It also exists because it captures feelings or concepts that standard language doesn’t quite reach. Young people adopted the term “slay,” which had been in English for centuries meaning to kill, but millennials and Gen Z recontextualized it as a positive term meaning to be impressive, stylish, or successful. This semantic shift didn’t happen by accident. It happened because “slay” felt like the perfect encapsulation of a particular kind of powerful, unapologetic confidence.

Terms like “rizz” (charisma), “aura” (existential presence), and “demure” all attempt to compress complex social observations into single, punchy words. They’re linguistic tools designed for a generation communicating in short-form video where you have seconds to convey maximum meaning.

What Internet Slang Says About Us

We’re Moving Faster and Feeling It

Language is evolving through the reception of viral, one-minute videos—a dramatic acceleration from the era when language mostly evolved through watching TV programs, listening to the radio, and slowly adopting terms through conversation. This speed has implications beyond linguistics. It suggests a culture increasingly fragmented by generational cohorts, each with its own linguistic identity.

We’re More Self-Aware and More Ironic

Modern slang is often meta. We create slang about slang. We use irony as a default mode. This reflects a generation that grew up with infinite information, aware that any viewpoint can be ridiculed, any earnest statement deconstructed. Irony becomes a protective mechanism.

We’re Building Community in Atomized Spaces

Despite—or perhaps because of—social fragmentation, people use slang to build micro-communities. Group chats, Discord servers, and TikTok trends create spaces where memes and new language are tested before making their way into the broader cultural vernacular. We’re not creating a single shared culture. We’re creating thousands of overlapping subcultures, each with its own linguistic signifiers.

The Future of Internet Slang

Predicting the future of internet slang is nearly impossible, but we can identify trends. The velocity will likely increase. New platforms will emerge, fragmenting language even further. AI-generated content will complicate questions about authenticity and organic emergence. And generational turnover will continue its relentless pace—Gen Alpha will develop slang that makes Gen Z sound hopelessly outdated.

What won’t change is the fundamental human impulse behind slang. We’ll continue using language to build community, exclude outsiders, express inexpressible feelings, and make sense of our moment in history. The forms will evolve. The function will remain.

Conclusion: Language as a Mirror

Internet slang isn’t frivolous. It’s a sophisticated linguistic response to a radically changed communication landscape. According to linguistics research, the addition of slang words each year is a natural part of language development, as technologies change, cultural priorities shift, and speakers of different languages interact with each other.

When we examine what terms go viral and what they mean, we’re essentially reading a cultural diary. “Demure” tells us about a hunger for quiet confidence. “Brainrot” reflects anxiety about technology. “Rizz” encodes our fascination with social capital and charisma. These aren’t just words—they’re mirrors reflecting who we are and what we value.

The next time you hear slang you don’t understand, resist the urge to dismiss it. Instead, ask: What does this term reveal about the generation using it? What feeling or concept does it capture? What does its popularity tell us about our moment in history? In the answer to those questions, you’ll find something far more interesting than just a new word. You’ll find evidence of how language, culture, and technology are evolving together in real time.