(cache)No Cap: Meaning Of The Teen Slang

Does your teen love using slang you don’t understand? Yes, and that’s “No cap.”

The phrase “No cap” basically means, “No lie,” says Urban Dictionary, with “cap” meaning “lie.”

“This meal is the best. No cap!” or “You weren’t online last night — you’re capping!” are two ways to use the phrase. Alternatively, if someone says, “That’s cap” they’re calling you out for a lie.

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“Cap or capping has referenced bragging, exaggerating, or lying since the early 1900’s,” Kelly Elizabeth Wright, an assistant professor language sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, tells TODAY.com.

Wright points to definitions from Green’s Dictionary of Slang: “to lie,” “to brag” and “to surpass, to outdo” with the latter, says Wright, coming from Black communities in the 1940s.

“Capping as a behavior was and is often used by African Americans while playing The Dozens, which is a social game involving insulting others with exquisite wordplay for fun,” says Wright. “Think ‘Yo Momma’ jokes, although that is a grossly blunt description of the practice.”

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Wright adds, “This play-related sense of ‘capping’ infuses today’s ‘no cap,’ which derived through The Dozens, into Southern hip-hop, diffused into other regional Black communities, and was recently (in the last decade) borrowed into mainstream informal usage. Some sources claim that ‘no cap’ stems from a comparison of solid gold versus gold-capped teeth; if one has a solid gold tooth, which cannot be removed when entering polite society ... I find this origin somewhat dubious, likely a folk etymology.”

According to Wright, “no cap” could replace “for real,” a phrase used by millennials and Gen Xers.

“Something to be on the lookout for, is that ‘for real’ is often represented as ‘FR’ online,” says Wright. “As no cap becomes more mainstream, we may see ‘NC’ appearing in more group texts, vlog transcripts, and advertisements ... Language is always changing all around us, but the direction it will take is often difficult to predict. Time will tell if ‘no cap’ becomes a stable pillar in our everyday usage such that it warrants abbreviation.”

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What does ‘no cap’ mean?

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