Yas (slang)


Yas is a playful or non-serious slang term equivalent to the excited or celebratory use of the interjection "yes!" Yas was added to Oxford Dictionaries in 2017, and defined as a form of exclamation "expressing great pleasure or excitement". Yas was defined by Oxygen's Scout Durwood as "a more emphatic 'yes' often paired with 'queen'. The more As in a yas, the higher the grade of excitement"; in other words, the exclamation often appears in the form "Yas, queen!" and with spelling variants such as "yaas!" or "yaaaas!"

History of the term

Yass was used by the character Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac's On the Road, published in 1957.
Yas, with its currently popular meaning, has roots in late 1980s ball culture, an LGBT subculture in the United States, and was adopted by the wider queer community in the 1990s. The term was used during performances by drag queens, as an expression of encouragement and support, and can be heard in the 1990 documentary film Paris Is Burning, which chronicles New York City's ball culture.
The expression entered the general public lexicon in the 2010s after being used by a Lady Gaga fan expressing his admiration for the singer's appearance in a viral video, and by Ilana Glazer in Broad City. By 2016, yas had spurred discussion as to whether it constituted cultural appropriation.