Shade

An insult made by implication rather than said outright: a sly compliment, a look or a pointed silence. To throw shade is to do it.

Shade is the insult you never actually say. To throw shade is to put someone down by implication: a compliment with a sting in it, a pointed silence, a look, a question that answers itself. Nobody can quote you, and everybody understood.

Dorian Corey gave the classic definition in Paris Is Burning: "Shade is, I don't tell you you're ugly, but I don't have to tell you, because you know you're ugly. And that's shade". If reading is a slap, shade is a raised eyebrow, and among queens a raised eyebrow can be the deadlier weapon.

Where it comes from

Shade grew up in the Black and Latino ballroom scene of New York. In Corey's telling, reading came first, as the open insult, and "then reading became a developed form, where it became shade". The film carried the word out of the balls in 1990, and over the next decades it went from gay bars to drag television to everyone.

Nobody knows for sure how shade came to mean an insult. Green's Dictionary of Slang lists it only as "etymology unknown", with a guess at the idea of putting someone in a poor light. Shady, meaning dishonest or suspicious, is an obvious relative, but the line between them has never been proved.

How it is used today

• Throw shade, throwing shade: to insult indirectly. College slang collections had it by 2014.
• Shady: describes the person or the remark: "that was shady."
• No shade, but: the phrase that announces shade is coming. "No shade, but you may want to wear something else".
• The shade of it all: a sigh at a situation that is quietly insulting.

RuPaul's Drag Race made shade a household word, and today you hear it about politicians, footballers and pop stars feuding through their lyrics. Much of the mainstream uses it as a synonym for any criticism, which misses the point: if you said it straight out, it is not shade, it is a read. Its companions are tea, kiki and werk, and it is as much a part of a queen's kit as her lashes.

Related terms