Word of the day · 11 May 2026
cap
/kæp/
noun
In slang, a lie or exaggeration; “no cap” means no lie. Also still an ordinary word for a lid or a soft hat.
In a sentence
- He said he finished the run in under an hour, but that was cap.
- No cap, the store really closed at noon.
- She twisted the cap onto the bottle and put it away.
In an image
Origin
African American Vernacular English and related youth slang; cap as lie spread widely through hip-hop and social media in the 2010s and 2020s, beside the older hat/lid senses.
History
Dictionaries now list the slang sense because searchers meet “that’s cap” in comments more often than they meet baseball caps in those threads. No cap works as a sincerity marker. Context still matters: a bottle cap is not a falsehood. The lookup spike is almost always the truth-telling sense.
Nearby words
lie · falsehood · fib
Street and internet slang for something that is not true.