Slay

To do something brilliantly, to dazzle and win, from a look to a lip sync: praise born in the gay and trans ballroom scene.

To slay is to do something so well that the room has no choice but to surrender. You slay a look, a lip sync, a job interview, a comeback in the group chat. The person who slays wins, and everyone else is just there to applaud. It is praise with a sword in it: not "nice," not "good," but "you killed it and the body is still warm."

It works as a verb ("he slayed"), as an exclamation ("Slay!") and as a cheer you shout at a friend before he walks into a bar in a new harness. It is not about effort. Nobody slays by trying hard; slaying looks easy, which is the whole point.

Where it comes from

Slay is an old English word for killing, and English speakers have been "killing" each other with jokes for a century: in the 1920s "you slay me" meant you made me laugh until it hurt. Gay men had their own sense early on. In 1941 the sex researcher Gershon Legman recorded slay as gay slang for running someone down, spreading gossip about him or betraying him, and gay glossaries were still listing it in 1965 and 1972. So before it meant triumph, among us it meant a stab in the back, which tells you something about the conversations of the time.

The meaning we use now grew up in the Black and Latino ballroom scene of the 1970s and 1980s, where a contestant slayed when outfit, face, walk and attitude were all flawless at once. The documentary Paris Is Burning carried the word out of the balls in the early 1990s, and from there it moved through gay bars, drag and fashion.

How it is used today

RuPaul's Drag Race, on air since 2009, made slay part of every fan's vocabulary, and in 2016 Beyoncé put it in a hit and handed it to the whole world. Today straight teenagers say it about pizza, which is how you know a gay word has fully escaped.

Among us it still has a little more bite. Slay sits in the same family as werk, serve, fierce and yas: words of applause born on the ballroom floor. Serve is about what you show, werk is about the effort that pays off, and slay is the result: the battle is over and you won.

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