Russia · Russianбабки (babki)
noun · Colloquial · BAB-kee
Cash, dosh. The most established money slang in Russian, plural only, and neutral enough that it turns up in business conversations that are otherwise entirely proper.
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Russia · Russian
Russian Slang
Russian slang is organised around one thing above all others: мат, the closed set of four taboo roots — хуй, пизда, ебать and блядь — from which the language builds an enormous, fully grammatical vocabulary. This is not swearing in the English sense of a handful of shock words. The roots take ordinary Russian prefixes and suffixes and generate verbs, adjectives, adverbs and abstract nouns that cover meanings with nothing rude about them at all: охуеть is to be astonished, заебался is exhausted, наебать is to defraud, похуй is not caring. A speaker can run a whole narrative on mat and be perfectly precise throughout. Against that sits an equally elaborate euphemistic layer, built by keeping the entire word-shape and swapping only the offending root — блин for блядь, капец for пиздец, офигеть for охуеть, забить with the taboo noun silently deleted. Knowing which grade of a word you are hearing is most of what register means in Russian.
The other two forces are historical and recent. Decades of the Soviet penal system pushed camp argot — фе́ня — into ordinary speech, so that words like беспредел, косяк, ксива and по понятиям are now said by people who have never been near a prison, usually without knowing where they come from; зашквар, currently a teenage word for anything shameful, has a prison origin most of its users would be startled by. Meanwhile молодёжный сленг absorbs English wholesale and russifies it on contact: a borrowed verb arrives with the -ить ending already attached, so чилить, флексить and гуглить conjugate and take aspect prefixes like any native verb, which is why this layer sounds domestic within months rather than decades. The trap for outsiders is not comprehension but calibration. Mat is an administrative offence in public and unbroadcastable, and a foreigner deploying it — especially a foreigner who has learned it from song lyrics — sounds either menacing or absurd. Understand the whole system; speak the euphemisms.
50 terms, each with definitions and worked examples.
By topic
Each page below collects every Russian term we have on one subject, side by side.
Start with these
The terms below carry the most usage detail — register, origin and the situations where they go wrong. They are the ones worth reading in full before the rest.
All Russian slang A–Z
50 terms
Terms beginning with B
беспредел (bespredel)
noun · Colloquial · byes-pree-DYEL
Lawlessness; conduct with no restraint of any kind. Used of police, officials, landlords, employers — anyone acting as though rules do not apply to them.
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блин (blin)
interjection · Informal · BLEEN
Damn; oh no. The single most common mild swear in Russian and the one foreigners can safely use — a schoolteacher says it, a grandmother says it, it appears in children's cartoons.
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блядь (blyad)
interjection, noun · Taboo · BLYAT
One of the four roots of мат, and by far the most frequent in speech. As a bare interjection it is 'fuck' in the sense of 'damn it' — surprise, pain, exasperation — and in unguarded male speech it degrades into a pure filler dropped between clauses like a comma.
+2 more senses
Use with care
бодун (bodun)
noun · Colloquial · ba-DOON
A hangover, always in the fixed phrase с бодуна — 'hungover'. The plain noun похмелье is the neutral term; бодун is what you actually say the morning after.
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братан (bratan)
noun · Informal · bra-TAN
Bro. An augmentative of брат 'brother', used to address a male friend or, pointedly, a stranger you are trying to keep on side.
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бухать (bukhat)
verb · Colloquial · boo-KHAT
To drink — seriously, at length and with intent. Not the word for a glass of wine with dinner; бухать describes an evening whose purpose is the drinking.
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бухло (bukhlo)
noun · Colloquial · bookh-LO
Booze. A collective noun covering whatever alcohol has been brought, with no interest whatsoever in what it is.
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Terms beginning with C
чилить (chilit)
verb · Informal · CHEE-leet
To chill; to do nothing in a deliberate, enjoyable way. Conjugates fully — чилю, чилишь, почилим — and has largely displaced отдыхать among under-thirties for the 'relax' sense.
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чувак (chuvak)
noun · Informal · choo-VAK
Dude; mate. Used both as a label for a man and as a form of address between friends, with чувиха as the female counterpart — though чувиха sounds cruder and more dated than чувак does.
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Terms beginning with D
давай (davay)
interjection, phrase · Colloquial · da-VAY
The standard informal sign-off on the phone: 'right, see you, bye'. Often doubled — давай-давай — and usually the last word before hanging up.
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динамить (dinamit)
verb · Informal · dee-NA-meet
To lead someone on and never deliver; to keep agreeing to meet and keep not turning up. The noun динамо names the act and динамщица the woman who makes a habit of it.
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Terms beginning with F
флексить (fleksit)
verb · Informal · FLEK-seet
To show off — money, clothes, a holiday. Borrowed from American rap slang and given a standard Russian infinitive, so it conjugates like any native verb: флексю, флексишь, флексил.
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фраер (frayer)
noun · Colloquial · FRA-yer
Originally, in camp argot, anyone outside the thieves' world — a civilian, and by extension an easy mark. The sense survives in the proverb жадность фраера сгубила, 'greed was the sucker's undoing'.
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Use with care
Terms beginning with G
гопник (gopnik)
noun · Colloquial · GOP-neek
A young man from a rough housing estate who hangs around in a tracksuit, squats on his heels and asks passers-by for a cigarette in a way that is not really a question.
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Use with care
гуглить (guglit)
verb · Informal · GOOG-leet
To google. Completely naturalised: it takes ordinary prefixes (загуглить for a single look-up, погуглить for a browse) and nobody registers it as foreign any more.
+1 more sense
Terms beginning with I
Terms beginning with K
как бы (kak by)
phrase, adverb · Colloquial · KAK by
Sort of; kind of. A hedge that softens whatever follows, and in heavy users a tic attached to every second phrase.
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капец (kapets)
noun, interjection · Informal · ka-PYETS
Disaster; that's it, it's over. The printable stand-in for пиздец, built to the same shape so that it can slot into the same sentences without changing the rhythm.
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халява (khalyava)
noun · Colloquial · kha-LYA-va
Something for nothing; a freebie. на халяву means 'free of charge, without having earned it', and the phrase carries a distinct national fondness — Russian jokes about халява are affectionate, not disapproving.
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хата (khata)
noun · Informal · KHA-ta
Somebody's flat, considered as a venue. хата свободна means the parents are away and everyone can come round — the word is inseparable from that situation.
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хавчик (khavchik)
noun · Colloquial · KHAV-cheek
Grub; something to eat. Purely about fuel — nobody describes a restaurant meal as хавчик.
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херня (khernya)
noun · Vulgar · hyer-NYA
Rubbish; nonsense; a thing of no value. Used both for talk that is untrue and for objects the speaker cannot be bothered to name — 'some bit of junk'.
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Use with care
хуй (khuy)
noun · Taboo · HOOY
The taboo word for the penis, and the single most productive root in the language: dozens of everyday words are built on it, most of which have nothing to do with anatomy.
+2 more senses
Use with care
короче (koroche)
adverb, interjection · Colloquial · ka-RO-che
Anyway; long story short. Announces that the speaker is about to get to the point, and is then very often followed by several more minutes of preamble.
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косяк (kosyak)
noun · Informal · ka-SYAK
A screw-up; a mistake that is somebody's fault. The verb накосячить means to make one, and косячить is to keep making them.
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краш (krash)
noun · Informal · KRASH
The person you have a crush on — note the shift: in Russian the word names the object of the feeling, never the feeling itself. мой краш is 'the person I fancy'.
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кринж (krinzh)
noun, adjective · Informal · KREENZH
Cringe — the specific embarrassment of watching someone humiliate themselves without realising it. Borrowed wholesale from English internet usage around 2020.
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ксива (ksiva)
noun · Colloquial · KSEE-va
Papers; an ID card, especially an official one that gets you past someone. Said with a slight edge — a ксива is documentation used as leverage rather than mere identification.
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Terms beginning with L
лавэ (lave)
noun · Informal · la-VEH
Money, especially money in hand. Flashier than бабки and strongly associated with rap lyrics, street trade and anyone performing a certain kind of swagger.
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лох (lokh)
noun · Colloquial · LOKH
A sucker; a mark; someone who can be taken for a ride and does not see it coming. The insult is about being naive and socially weak rather than unintelligent.
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Use with care
Terms beginning with M
мент (ment)
noun · Colloquial · MYENT
A cop. Disrespectful but so widespread that a long-running television series about decent detectives was called Менты — which took much of the sting out without removing it.
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Use with care
мудак (mudak)
noun · Vulgar · moo-DAK
A contemptible idiot — close to 'arsehole' in force and in usage. The charge is not stupidity so much as behaving badly and not noticing.
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Use with care
Terms beginning with N
наебать (nayebat)
verb · Taboo · na-ye-BAT
To swindle; to cheat someone out of money or out of what was agreed. Stronger and angrier than кинуть, and implies the speaker considers the deception deliberate and personal.
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Use with care
норм (norm)
adjective, adverb, interjection · Informal · NORM
Fine; all right; good enough. The standard low-effort reply to 'how are you' and to 'what did you think', and a genuine positive — норм is not damning with faint praise.
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Terms beginning with O
офигеть (ofiget)
verb, interjection · Informal · a-fee-GYET
To be amazed; as an interjection, 'wow' or 'you're kidding'. The clean parallel of охуеть, formed by swapping the mat root for the harmless фиг.
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охуеть (okhuyet)
verb, interjection · Taboo · a-hoo-YET
To be completely floored by something. As a bare interjection, охуеть is 'holy shit' — and, like the English, it works for the magnificent and the appalling alike.
+2 more senses
Use with care
Terms beginning with P
пиздец (pizdets)
noun, interjection · Taboo · peez-DYETS
Total catastrophe; the end of everything. The noun names a situation past saving — 'we are completely fucked' compressed into one word.
+2 more senses
Use with care
по понятиям (po ponyatiyam)
phrase, adverb · Colloquial · pa pa-NYA-tee-yam
By the unwritten code rather than by the law. Names the parallel system of obligation — who owes whom, what counts as fair — that the criminal world ran on and that ordinary Russians borrowed as a way of describing informal rules anywhere.
+1 more sense
похуй (pokhuy)
phrase, adverb · Taboo · PO-hooy
Don't care in the slightest. The construction is impersonal — мне похуй, 'to me it is [that word]' — and expresses a refusal to be bothered rather than mere indifference.
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Use with care
Terms beginning with S
Terms beginning with T
тачка (tachka)
noun · Informal · TACH-ka
A car; motor. The default informal word, with no implication about the quality of the vehicle — a тачка can be a wreck or a new Mercedes.
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типа (tipa)
adverb, phrase · Colloquial · TEE-pa
Like; sort of. Hedges an approximation — типа того, 'something like that' — and introduces reported speech exactly as English 'like' does: он типа не знал.
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туса (tusa)
noun · Informal · TOO-sa
A party, a gathering, a night out — and also the crowd that shows up to it. тусовка additionally means a scene or milieu: театральная тусовка is the theatre crowd.
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Terms beginning with V
Terms beginning with Z
забить (zabit)
verb · Informal · za-BEET
To drop something; to stop caring about it and walk away. Always with на: забить на учёбу, 'to give up on studying'.
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замутить (zamutit)
verb · Informal · za-moo-TEET
To get something going with someone — to start a relationship, usually a casual one. замутить с кем-то, and the noun мутки for the resulting entanglement.
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зашквар (zashkvar)
noun, adjective · Informal · zash-KVAR
Something shameful, beneath contempt, that taints anyone who touches it. In teenage use it is roughly 'that's a disgrace' and is applied to clothes, music and opinions.
+1 more sense
Use with care
заебал (zayebal)
verb · Taboo · za-ye-BAL
You've worn me out; I've had enough of you. Always in the past tense with the offender as subject — ты заебал — and always about accumulated irritation rather than a single offence.
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Use with care
жесть (zhest)
noun, interjection · Informal · ZHEST
Brutal; heavy going; grim. Said of anything harsh enough to be hard to watch — a news report, a shift at work, a horror film.
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