French slang you will actually hear: mec, truc, ouais

The French slang you will actually hear is mostly not the back-to-front verlan that gets written about. It is a small set of everyday informal words: ouais ("yeah"), truc ("thing"), mec ("guy"), boulot ("job"), pote ("mate"), flic ("cop") and fric ("cash"). In 318 million words of French film and television subtitles, truc and mec are each said more than 350 times per million words, and flic is said more often than the standard word for a police officer. Verlan words such as meuf ("woman") and chelou ("dodgy") are real, but each turns up a few times per million at most. Below are the counts, how informal the dictionaries rate each word, how verlan is built, and which swear words are said most.

Updated 13 October 2026 · 7 min read

How informal is "familier"?

French dictionaries put a label on each word that is not neutral, and the labels are the best guide to when a word is safe to use. Le Robert's online dictionary uses four that matter here:

Almost everything in the next two sections is familier. That is the point: French has a whole casual layer of vocabulary for use with friends and family, sitting alongside the standard words. Wiktionnaire's labels sometimes go one step further — it marks keuf as populaire and kiffer, vénère and pécho as argot — and that difference is worth noticing.

Slang that beats the standard word

The quickest way to see how ordinary this layer is: put each informal word next to the usual word for the same thing. All figures are per million words of French subtitles.

Two informal words win outright. Flic is said two and a half times as often as policier, and the plurals agree (flics 83.15, policiers 19.66). Pote is said more often than copain, the other everyday word for a friend. Mec and boulot are each said about half as often as homme and travail, and truc a quarter as often as chose — none of them is a rarity.

Some of the standard words have other meanings, which flatters them: argent is also silver, homme is also "mankind", fille is also "daughter". The informal words have fewer, so this table, if anything, understates them. Ouais also works as a filler; how it does that job is in filler words in other languages, and fric against the other languages' slang for money is in love or money: what films say most.

Verlan: how back-to-front French works

Verlan is slang made by reversing a word. Its own name is an example: Wiktionnaire derives it from l'envers, "the wrong way round", with the syllables swapped. Le Robert defines it as reversing the syllables of certain words, sometimes changing the vowels, and gives mec → keum.

There are three main patterns:

• Two syllables, swapped. Louche (dodgy) → chelou; bizarre → zarbi. Énervé (wound up) gives vénère.
• One syllable, reversed by sound. Lourd (heavy, tiresome) → relou: the sounds are swapped and an e is added to make it sayable. Fou (mad) → ouf; femme → meuf.
• Flipped, then cut short. Flic became keufli and then keuf; fête (party) became teufé and then teuf. The cop slang is itself the result of slang applied twice: flic is already informal, and keuf is the verlan of it.

Verbs can be reversed too: choper (to catch) → pécho, which also means "to pull", to get off with someone.

Verlan on screen is rarer than you might think

Two of these are ceilings. Ouf is also the ordinary "phew!" of relief — Le Robert's first entry for it — and the count cannot tell the two apart. Vénère is also a form of vénérer, "to venerate". Among the source words, louche is also a ladle and lourd is mostly just "heavy".

Even meuf, the best known, is about one per hundred femme. Several things may push verlan down in this list, and the count cannot say which: subtitles are tidied for reading, and the list does not record which films were made in French and which were translated into it. What it does show is that a learner will meet mec and truc hundreds of times for every keum.

French swear words, by how often they are said

Merde is number 260 of all French words. Le Robert labels it only familier, and records its polite nickname, le mot de Cambronne: its example has General Cambronne answering merde ! to the English when they called on him to surrender. Putain ! on its own is an exclamation of annoyance and, by extension, of surprise or admiration — the dictionary's own description — so it does the work English gives to f*ck, damn and wow. These are words to recognise. Use them in French as you would their English equivalents, which mostly means: not with people you have just met.

Which French slang should a learner learn first?

The common informal words in the first table are worth learning early, because you cannot follow a conversation without them. Spoken French in general is a long way from the written language, and that gap is measured in how many words you need to speak French; this page only covers its slang. The order to take it in:

1. Understand the familier layer — ouais, truc, mec, boulot, pote, flic, fric. Saying them is fine with friends.
2. Recognise the swear words, especially merde and putain, which you will hear constantly.
3. Recognise the common verlan — meuf, chelou, relou, teuf — which you will meet far less often than the words in step 1.

Ouais, truc, mec, boulot, pote and flic are all among the 1,000 most common French words, and the two-minute French vocabulary test shows how far down that list you already are. Verbavia (our own course) teaches French from the same kind of frequency list, free on the web in any browser, including on a phone, with grammar explained in English and hand-written lessons. Whether the rest of the language is as approachable is in is French hard to learn; the words that went the other way are in French words used in English; and Spanish slang, which varies by country rather than by register, is in regional Spanish slang.

How merde compares with the commonest swear word of seven other languages is in the most common swear word in each language.

The hundred commonest word forms of all, each with its meaning, are in the 100 most common French words.

Sources

• Le Robert, Dictionnaire en ligne, entries consulted: mec, nana, truc, boulot, bouffer, flic, fric, bagnole, ouais, pote, bosser, fringue, meuf, chelou, relou, zarbi, teuf, ouf, keuf, kiffer, thune, verlan, merde, putain, con, connard, chier.
• Wiktionnaire, entries consulted for the verlan derivations and labels: verlan (from l'envers), meuf (from femme), keuf (from flic via keufli; populaire), keum, relou, chelou, ouf, vénère (argot; also a form of vénérer), zarbi, teuf (via teufé), pécho (from choper; argot), kiffer (argot).
• Lison, P. & Tiedemann, J. (2016). OpenSubtitles2016: Extracting Large Parallel Corpora from Movie and TV Subtitles. Proceedings of LREC 2016. aclanthology.org
• Dave, H. FrequencyWords: frequency lists from OpenSubtitles 2018, content licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. github.com. The corpus size is computed by scripts/frequency_curves.py and printed from its output rather than typed. The ranks and per-million rates are our own count of the same fr list: each word's count divided by the total of all counts in the list, for the exact lower-case spelling shown, singular unless the table says otherwise.