French Slang and Verlan: How French People Actually Talk
Open a French textbook and you get one France: polite, careful, everyone addressing everyone else as vous. Sit on a bus in Lyon for ten minutes and you get another France entirely, and it is the one your textbook never mentions. This lesson is the gap between the two.
Start with the people. is a guy, a bloke - "le mec dans le bus" is just the man on the bus, no judgement attached. Between a couple, "mon mec" slides into meaning boyfriend. meuf is the female equivalent, a woman or girl, and it is your first glimpse of a machine worth learning, because meuf is verlan for femme - more on that machine shortly. , , is a mate, a buddy, the person you would actually ask for help moving a sofa. None of the three is remotely rude. They are simply not vous-and-veuillez French; they are the French people use with people they already trust.
Money and work come with their own slang, because money and work always do. is cash, dosh, the stuff in your pocket - "j'ai pas de fric" is I'm skint. is the job, the daily grind, and it is so normal that "au boulot" - back to work - gets said in offices that would never allow "merde" in the same sentence. is a cop, informal but not abusive; it is simply what French people say instead of the stiffer policier when they are talking, not filling in a form.
Then there are the words for stuff that will not sit still and be named properly. is to eat, but with none of manger's manners - it is scoffing, tucking in, eating like you mean it: "on bouffe où ce soir ?", where are we eating tonight. is a car, the word French speakers reach for before automobile ever crosses their mind. And is the great French shrug of a word - thing, thingy, whatsit, the noun you deploy the instant the real one will not come: "passe-moi le truc", pass me the thing. Learn truc early. You will use it before you can conjugate a single irregular verb.
Now the machine behind half of this: verlan. The name is the demonstration - verlan is l'envers, backwards, said backwards. The rule is simple even if the results are not always obvious: take a word, roughly flip its syllables, and the flipped version becomes new slang in its own right, often outliving the plain word in everyday speech. Femme becomes meuf. Fou, mad, becomes ouf - "c'est ouf", that's mad, is said constantly and means exactly what it looks like it should mean once you know the trick. Lourd, literally heavy, becomes relou, meaning annoying, a real drag to deal with. Louche, shady or suspicious, becomes chelou, meaning weird, off, a bit dodgy. Verlan began in working-class Paris suburbs decades ago as a way of talking that outsiders, and especially the police, could not immediately follow. It has since walked straight into the mainstream: meuf, ouf and relou now turn up on the radio and in newspapers, no longer coded at all.
Kiffer did not come from verlan - it arrived through Arabic via French argot more broadly - but it sits in exactly the same register, and it is one of the most useful words on this page. It means to really like something, to be into it, stronger than the flat aimer: "je kiffe cette chanson", I love this song. You will hear it from teenagers and forty-year-olds alike.
Texting has its own shorthand on top of all this, and the one worth knowing is mdr: mort de rire, dead from laughing, the exact French equivalent of lol. It stands alone as a reaction or gets bolted onto the end of a sentence for emphasis, and like lol it belongs in a text to a friend, not an email to your landlord.
One more thing worth a register note, because it trips learners up constantly: ? itself is not slang, but how it lands depends entirely on company. Between friends it is the default hello, tossed off with barely a glance; with a stranger or anyone older it can read as presumptuous unless you have already exchanged a bonjour. The words on this page work the same way. None of them are crude, and none will get you in trouble - but they are for the people you already know, not the ones you are meeting for the first time in a suit.
That is the real skill here, more than any single word: knowing which France you are standing in. If you have not yet sorted the polite end of the register, the greetings and courtesies are the other half of the same lesson.