About

CaliSlang is a free school for the varieties of English spoken in California. It holds 356 dictionary entries and a set of short courses anyone in the world can take, with no account.

How to learn here

The dictionary is the reference. The courses are the teaching. Start with Your first week if you have never been to California, or tell us why you are here on the start page. Flashcards, quizzes, listening practice, and fill-in-the-blank drills sit underneath the courses so you can keep the words.

What is in here

California English is not one thing, so the dictionary is split into four tracks. Slang is the everyday vocabulary, much of it inherited from surf culture and West Coast rap. Places collects the nicknames Californians use for their own cities and roads, which are often opaque to outsiders — “the City” means San Francisco in the Bay Area and downtown Los Angeles six hundred kilometres south. Spanish & Chicano covers vocabulary that entered California English through four centuries of Spanish-speaking presence. Silicon Valley covers the jargon that leaked out of the technology industry.

How words are labeled

Every entry carries a region, a difficulty, and a register. The register label matters most: a learner who finds a word online has no way to know whether it is harmless, mildly crude, or a genuine slur. Anything tagged Strong or Vulgar is documented so you can recognize it, not so you can use it, and you can hide those entries entirely from the Learn page.

Difficulty is about how far a word travels, not how hard it is to pronounce. Widely known words are understood across the English-speaking world. Deep local words will not be recognized outside a specific city, and in some cases not outside a specific neighborhood.

Honesty about the source

This dictionary is a rebuild of an older site, and it inherited that site’s word list in full. Some of what it inherited is uneven. Around thirty entries — clustered under the letters X and Q, where the original had gaps to fill — read as invented rather than attested. They are kept for completeness, marked Unconfirmed, and excluded from quizzes, because teaching someone a word that no Californian says would be worse than having a shorter dictionary.

Entries missing example sentences are marked as such on the page rather than quietly padded. Slang is a moving target and this will always be incomplete.

Privacy

There are no accounts and no analytics. Your flashcard progress is stored in your own browser and never sent anywhere, which is why you can export it from the Learn page if you want to move it to another device. Video thumbnails and players load from YouTube only after you press play.

A note on usage

Definitions here describe how words are actually used, not how anyone ought to speak. Some of this vocabulary belongs to specific communities, and a word being documented is not an invitation for everyone to start using it. Where that applies, the usage note says so directly.