Werk

A shout of approval and encouragement, "work" said with attitude: you look amazing, keep going. Also a verb, as in werking a look.

Werk is a shout of approval: yes, go on, you look amazing, keep doing exactly that. You yell it at a queen who nails a death drop, at a friend who walks in with a new haircut, at a man on the dance floor who knows what he is doing. It can be an exclamation ("Werk!"), a command ("werk it!") or a verb ("she is werking that dress").

It is spelled with an e on purpose. Werk is "work" said with attitude, stretched and bent the way it sounds when someone shouts it across a club, and the spelling tells you that you are not talking about your job.

Where it comes from

Nobody can say who first shouted "work!" at a performer. The word is at home in Black American and gay speech and in the ballroom scene, where the crowd shouts encouragement as people walk their categories. Green's Dictionary of Slang lists it as an American exclamation of affirmation and finds the spelling werk in print by 2005; by 2016 a college slang collection defined it as an "expression of approval", with the example "You killed that dance! Werk!".

RuPaul's 1990s dance hit "Supermodel (You Better Work)" had already put the battle cry on the radio, and RuPaul's Drag Race later made "werk" part of every fan's vocabulary.

How it is used today

• Werk!: pure praise, often repeated: "werk, werk, werk!"
• Werk it: show it off, make the most of it.
• Werking: doing something brilliantly: "he is werking those shorts."

Werk lives in the same family as yas, slay, serve and fierce: words of praise that sound best shouted. Like most of them, it has spread to straight friends, office chats and brand campaigns, where it tends to lose the e and some of the magic.

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