“Yapping” Is TikTok's New Favorite Word — Here's What It Means

The ever-changing tides of the internet and its accompanying slang can be jarring, but sometimes it reveals something with true staying power. The word “zaddy,” for example, is no longer just a word used in conversation with your chronically online friends — I’m pretty sure my mom used it recently to describe her everlasting crush on Richard Gere. Then “cheugy,” which has cemented its spot in the lexicon in 2021 and plagues millennials with the fear of being labeled as such to this day.

Sometimes the words are made up (see above) and sometimes they are simply repackaged from their original form to appeal to the meme-scrolling, internet brain rot masses. Take “rizz,” short for charisma, which started off as a TikTok inside joke then was awarded Oxford’s word of the year for 2023.

A similar linguistic revamp is currently happening with the term “yap” and all of its derivatives. Even Beyoncé uses the word on her new album Cowboy Carter: “When they know it’s slappin’, then here come the yappin’.”

According to TikTok and X, you’re no longer an annoying person who talks too much, you’re simply a yapper. According to Merriam-Webster, to yap is “to talk in a shrill insistent way” — the human conversational equivalent of a hairless Chihuahua’s bark. But right now, the ability to yap is actually a compliment. The cutesy noun iteration (“yapper”) is a label to reclaim proudly and find your online community of other people who struggle to know when to shut the heck up.

To “yap” is to have the ability to talk about anything. It’s lower stakes than gossip but more intriguing than small talk. “Every yapper gf needs a listener bf,” wrote X user @hotmessjunk on a viral photo of Taylor Swift talking with her mouth wide open to boyfriend Travis Kelce. TikTok user @_lils_ posted a clip with the caption “When I meet a fellow yapper and we can yap for hours on end without running out of things to yap about,” as she mimicked note-taking in the video. The post has over half a million likes and thousands of comments from fellow yappers and the people who love them.

“My yapper and I have never finished a conversation. It’s just one long inner monologue shared,” one person wrote. “Not a yapper myself but I love being with one,” wrote another.

Perhaps these yapper and non-yapper relationships are the 2024 version of “black cat and golden retriever energy,” another altered version of the Bouba-Kiki phenomenon that simply reiterates the age-old “opposites attract” mentality in a way that appeals to people who spend too much time on their favorite platforms.

Online, users are always looking out for the next “-core” to take over their feeds and the next “-ification” to define a moment in time. The year 2023 was all about girlhood, the coquettecore of everything, the cute-ification of existence. People were putting bows on their food to round out this past December, remember? The most enmeshed users of the internet love making things adorable — they call grown men baby girls and can’t get enough of the nickname Pookie, for God’s sake — so why wouldn’t a dainty little term for someone with chronic word vomit be the next trend? If “yapper” continues on its internet feed domination, it’s only a matter of time until it becomes a full-on etymological phenomenon IRL. Hey, if I can yap about the word itself this much, there must be something to it.