We Attempted to Decode the Most Popular Internet Acronyms Used by Teens and It Didn't Go Great

Social media site Ask.fm released a list of most used slang terms and some of them confused the crap out of us

By Jenna Mullins Jan 19, 2016 10:10 PMTags
Teen TextingJiangang Wang/Getty Images

It's 9 p.m. Do you know what acronyms your kids are using?!

That should totally be a new PSA that runs on TV at night. Because it's not about where your kids are; it's about what kind of slang words they're sending each other on social media.

Askfm, the super popular Q&A social networking site, has released a list of the most popular acronyms and slang terms among its younger users as a way to inform parents on what the hell their kids are talking about online.

"Teen language can experience a seismic shift with just a few clicks, texts or posts, and word or even symbol choices can literally change by the day," Andrea Cutright, ASKfm COO said in a statement. "Teens use our Q&A platform as a means to express themselves through dialogue so we have our finger on the pulse of how teens talk—be it in the form of acronyms, new definitions or the latest emoji. With this list, parents can now rest easy in the knowledge that being called GOAT is actually a very good thing and OOTD can explain why their teens take four dozen selfies."

We can't imagine parents "resting easy" when they see their kids are using something that means "that ho over there," but we get the idea.

Before we show you the list of slang terms and acronyms and what they all mean, you should know that E! Online employees of all ages tried to decipher them first and it went...OK. Sort of. We were mediocre at best, tbh. Also, why wasn't "TBH" one of the choices? We know what that means.

To be fair, most of the people we asked knew at least half of these. We're hip with the kids when it comes to stuff being "cool AF." But for others, we were totally clueless and our guesses are total shots in the dark at best. So check out our answers below and try and guess yourself what these popular teen Internet acronyms stand for:

PAP
"Pee-pees and pee-pees" (new term for sausage fest)
"Please ask pop"
"Pap smear"
"Paparazzi"
"Pies are perfect" 

IDEK
"I did everything, k?"
"I don't ever know"

IKR
"I keep it real"
"I know (the) reason" 

OOTD
"Out of tortillas, damn"
"Over our total day"
"Out of the day"
"One obvious total d--k."
"Out of the dairy" (to mean something is really fresh? Do people still say "fresh?") 

SMH
"So much hate"
"Same, honestly"
"So many hoes"
"Stole my heart"

THOT
"Something about tator tots"
"Thong time"
"Total hate for outside time" 

AF
"Always and forever"
"And fail"

TBR
"To be real"
"That boy, right?"
"Take back realness" 

GOAT
"Girl, one a time"
"Get outta town"
"Going out at ten"
"Go on and talk"

Like we said, it could have gone better. Just when you think you're totally down with the youths with their FMLs and OMGs and all that, this kind of list comes along. At least we knew what most of the slang terms meant. It's the acronyms that got us.

Here is the full list of the most popular terms used by teenagers and their definitions, according to Askfm:

1. PAP: "Post a picture"
2. Bad: "Just like the olden days of parents' yore, bad still means good but it has shifted slightly and means something even more positive like hot"
3.  Ship: "Short for relationship"
4. :3: "A symbol meant to represent the cat face made by anime characters when they say something clever, sarcastic, or comment on something cute"
5.  IDEK: "I don't even know"
6. IKR: "I know, right?"
7. OOTD: "Outfit of the day"
8. SMH: "Shaking my head"
9. Dime: "The highest rating on a scale of 1-10; used to share approval or express how good something is"
10. THOT: "That ho over there"
11. Netflix and chill: "Code for hooking up"
12. Savage: "Used to describe something that is hardcore or extreme, in a good way"
13. AF: "As f--k"
14. TBR: "To be rude"
15. Peep: "Can refer either to friends (your people), or to look at/listen to (e.g. peep this)"
16. Slept: "Can refer to hitting someone hard enough to knock them out, missing out on something awesome, or to be extremely high"
17. GOAT: "Greatest of all time"
18. No chill: "Used to describe someone who is being irrational"
19. Likers get rate: "A phrase that implies the original poster will rank anyone that likes/comments/answers a post, typically around how cool they are perceived to be or how they look; also used to incent followers to like posts to get something (usually indicated in the post) in return"
20. Frog emoji + coffee cup emoji: "Based off a popular meme of Kermit the Frog drinking a cup of tea, teens use this emoji combo to sarcastically imply ‘but that's none of my business' or ‘I'm just saying'"

And that's how you communicate with teens in 2016.

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