Calling something cheugy means it's no longer cool: uncool because it follows generic tastes that were trendy once, such as live laugh love signs or anything that says girl boss. It's pronounced CHOO-ghee, and it's mostly aimed at lifestyle trends from the early 2010s.
Wikipedia describes it as the opposite of trendy, or trying too hard, and calls it a pejorative. Here's where it came from.
A word that waited eight years
According to a 2021 New York Times article, as reported by Wikipedia, Gaby Rasson coined cheugy in 2013, while she was at high school, for people who were slightly off trend. Know Your Meme says she was 15, and that the word spread among her classmates and then to their colleges.
What strikes me is the gap. The word existed for about eight years spreading among classmates and their colleges before most people heard it.
How TikTok made it famous
That changed in March 2021, when a TikTok video by Hallie Cain sent the word viral. The New York Times piece widened the reach, and the American Dialect Society voted cheugy its informal word of the year for 2021.
It was in good company. A year earlier, Australia's Macquarie Dictionary had picked doomscrolling as its Committee's Choice for 2020, another internet word to make a word-of-the-year list.
What gets called cheugy
The examples in the sources are mom jeans, live laugh love signs, Minion memes and anything that says girl boss. Minion memes being on the list is a reminder that even a meme, something built to be copied, can tip over into looking dated.
Cheugy, quickly
Who coined cheugy?
Gaby Rasson, in 2013, according to the New York Times.
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Is cheugy an insult?
Wikipedia calls it pejorative, though some people use it positively about their own style.
How do you say cheugy?
CHOO-ghee.
What is an example of cheugy?
Mom jeans, live laugh love signs and Minion memes are cited.
Would I use it?
It's handy shorthand, and it names something real: the taste that was fashionable a few years ago and hasn't moved since. But its peak was 2021, and slang ages fast, so dropping it into a caption now risks sounding a bit cheugy itself. In marketing copy, I'd describe the dated look plainly instead.
Was it ever about Gen Z versus millennials?
Wikipedia reports that commentators saw the 2021 coverage as part of a Gen Z versus millennial war narrative, and one called that framing a distraction. The word itself doesn't need the fight: Rasson coined it for people slightly off trend.
