Japanese slang & colloquial words

Textbook Japanese gets you through a job interview; this page is the Japanese friends actually speak. やばい flips between "terrible" and "amazing" depending on the eyebrows, めっちゃ intensifies everything, and half of what trends on Japanese social media eventually becomes a verb ending in る (バズる — to go viral).

The list gathers everything tagged colloquial, slang, or internet slang in the dictionary. Mind the register: these words are for friends and social feeds, not your boss or your host family's grandmother — and slang ages fast, so check the frequency sort before adopting something as your catchphrase.

Filter by JLPT to find the casual words that still show up in exams, or sort by frequency to learn the ones you'll hear within a week in Japan.