Dating lexicon · Youth and internet slang
“No cap” means “no joke” or “honestly”; “cap” on its own means a lie.
“No cap” means “no joke”, “for real”, “honestly”. Whoever writes it wants to stress that they mean something seriously. The counterpart is “cap”: it stands for a lie or an exaggeration. So “that’s cap” means “that’s not true”.
The expression comes from African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and hip-hop and has made its way into German too via social media.
In a chat you might read: “You’ve honestly got the most beautiful eyes on here, no cap.” So the compliment is meant to be explicitly sincere. Or as doubt: “You’re 1.95 m tall? Cap.”
On DaddyBoy
You can simply answer a “no cap” compliment warmly: “Thanks, that really means a lot.” And if someone writes “cap” to you, he usually just wants to tease you – a bit of humour helps more than a long justification.
Related
- sus“Sus” means suspicious or questionable, short for “suspicious” – it became well known through the game “Among Us”.
- lowkey and highkey“Lowkey” means “a bit, secretly”, “highkey” the opposite: “quite openly, totally”.
- glazing“Glazing” means praising someone excessively and undeservedly – as if coating them in thick sugar icing.