smash

What it means

1. 1.

   To sleep with someone, or to judge someone worth sleeping with. Youth Word of the Year 2022, and mainly encountered in the game format 'Smash oder Pass' rather than as a free verb.

2. 2.

   Honestly: outside that game and its TikTok context it is thin. German teenagers do say it, but adults deploying 'smash' in ordinary conversation sound exactly as odd as the award coverage made them sound, and it never developed the full verbal paradigm a native word would have.

Examples with translations

• Smash oder Pass?

  Would you or wouldn't you?

  Note: The game format. Almost all real-world use of the word is this.

• Den würde ich smashen.

  I'd go there.

  Note: Grammatically German, lexically English — the hybrid is typical of current youth borrowings.

Where it comes from

Straight from English internet slang, where 'smash or pass' had been a meme format since the early 2010s. It arrived in German through TikTok around 2021 and won Langenscheidt's Youth Word of the Year in 2022, an award whose winners are chosen by public vote and which reliably overstates how established a word is.

First attested: 2021