чувак (chuvak)

What it means

1. 1.

   Dude; mate. Used both as a label for a man and as a form of address between friends, with чувиха as the female counterpart — though чувиха sounds cruder and more dated than чувак does.

2. 2.

   Carries a faint retro charm rather than reading as current youth slang; a Russian twenty-year-old is likelier to say бро or братан.

Examples with translations

• Чувак, ты вообще где?

  Mate, where even are you?

• Там один чувак сказал, что офис закрыт.

  Some guy there said the office was shut.

Where it comes from

From the стиляги subculture of the 1950s, probably from a dialect word for a castrated animal. The backronym 'человек, уважающий великую американскую культуру' is a much-repeated joke invented decades later, not an etymology.

First attested: 1950s

Other forms

Romanised as:

chuvak

Spellings and variants:

чувиха