The Love France Guide № 006: French Slang & Verlan

The word verlan is itself a piece of verlan: take l’envers (“the reverse”), flip the syllables, and you get vers-l’en — verlan. That self-describing trick is the whole game, a coded French built by turning ordinary words back to front so that femme becomes meuf and fou becomes ouf. This is Guide № 006 in The Love France Guide series.

What Verlan Actually Is

Verlan works by inverting the syllables of a word, then often trimming or reshaping the result so it sits comfortably in the mouth. Français flips to céfran, arabe to beur, mère to reum, père to reup, and flic (a slang word for police) to keuf. Single-syllable words are handled by first splitting them around a silent or added vowel — which is how fou (“mad”) becomes ouf, giving the ubiquitous phrase un truc de ouf for something wild or unbelievable.

The mechanism is playful but not random: speakers feel out what sounds right, which is why the same source word can yield different forms in different neighbourhoods and decades. Dictionaries such as Larousse and Le Robert now record dozens of these terms, and the reference lexicon maintained by the Centre National de Ressources Textuelles et Lexicales tracks their spread into mainstream usage.

Where It Came From

Syllable-swapping games in French are old — isolated examples appear centuries back — but verlan as a living social code took shape in the working-class and immigrant neighbourhoods of the Paris banlieues across the second half of the twentieth century. It spread through youth culture, and by the 1970s and 1980s it had a public face: Renaud’s 1977 song Laisse béton (béton being verlan for tomber, “to drop it”) pushed the slang into national hearing, and hip-hop groups in the following decade made it a badge of identity.

Verlan belongs to a wider French tradition of coded speech, or argot, whose roots reach to medieval criminal cant and the jargon parodied by the poet François Villon. The story of French and its many registers is now told at the Cité internationale de la langue française, opened in 2023 in the château of Villers-Cotterêts — the very place where a 1539 royal edict made French the language of administration.

Cousins of Verlan: Louchébem and Javanais

Verlan is not the only French code that hides words in plain sight. Louchébem was the slang of Parisian butchers, especially around the old La Villette markets: you move the first consonant to the end, add an “L” at the front, and tack on a suffix — so boucher (“butcher”) becomes louchébem, which is the word for the code itself. Javanais works differently, inserting the sound “av” (or “va”) inside words, turning bonjour into bavonjavour.

These systems share verlan’s purpose: to let a group speak freely in front of outsiders. What sets verlan apart is how thoroughly it escaped its origins — several of its words are now simply informal French, taught to learners and printed in the same dictionaries that once ignored street speech entirely.

The Words You’ll Actually Hear

A handful of verlan terms are so common that many French speakers no longer register them as slang. Meuf (from femme) means a woman or girlfriend; relou (from lourd) means annoying or heavy-going; chelou (from louche) means shady or weird; vénère (from énervé) means angry; and chanmé (from méchant) can mean “awesome” much as English “wicked” does. The 1984 film Les Ripoux took its title from verlan for pourri (“rotten”), meaning corrupt cops.

One sign of a truly settled word is that it gets verlanised a second time. Arabe became beur, and when beur itself grew too familiar it was flipped again into reubeu (or rebeu). This “double verlan” shows the code renewing itself, staying one step ahead of the mainstream that keeps absorbing it.

Using It Without Getting It Wrong

For a visitor, verlan is worth recognising far more than deploying. Register matters: these words belong to casual, spoken French among friends, not to a shop counter, a work email, or a conversation with someone older you’ve just met. Some verlan carries edge or crude connotations, and a term that sounds friendly from an insider can land badly from an outsider who has misjudged the context.

The safe move is comprehension. Knowing that un truc de ouf means “a crazy thing” or that c’est chelou means “that’s dodgy” will unlock a lot of overheard conversation, film dialogue and song lyrics. Formal French, meanwhile, remains the domain guarded by the Académie française, and language policy for the country is set through the culture ministry at Ministère de la Culture and promoted worldwide by the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie.

Myths Worth Retiring

Myth: Verlan is just teenagers being lazy with the language. It is a rule-governed system with consistent patterns, capable of the same word-play, double-coding and renewal found in any slang tradition — and several of its coinages have entered standard dictionaries.

Myth: You reverse the letters of a word. Verlan reverses syllables, then reshapes the sound; it is a spoken game about how a word sounds, not how it is spelled. Femme does not become “emmef” — it becomes meuf.

Myth: It’s a single fixed vocabulary. Verlan shifts by generation and neighbourhood, and once a term goes mainstream it is often re-verlanised, so the “correct” form of a word can genuinely differ between speakers.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is verlan used all over France or only in Paris?

It began in the Paris region but spread nationally through music, film and social media, so the most common words are understood across France. Very local or newer coinages may not travel, and older speakers may recognise them without using them.

Should I try speaking verlan as a learner?

Aim to understand it rather than perform it. A few well-placed words among friends can work, but misjudging tone or context reads awkwardly, and some terms are cruder than a dictionary gloss suggests. Comprehension carries almost all the benefit with none of the risk.

Where can I look up a verlan word I’ve heard?

The mainstream dictionaries Le Robert and Larousse now include widely used terms, and the lexical database at the CNRTL is useful for tracing a word’s origin and register. If a term isn’t listed, it may still be too new or too local to have been recorded.

More The Love France Guides

The Love France Guide is a numbered series — one tightly focused subject at a time, each with its own downloadable collectible edition. Guide № 001 is The Croissant, Guide № 002 is Bastille Day, Guide № 003 is The Béret, Guide № 004 is French Wine & Terroir, Guide № 005 is Café & Bistro Etiquette, This is Guide № 006. More editions are on the way.