wack
Noun pluralwacks
Pluralwacks
- 1Disappointingly bad, unoriginal, or uncool; lousy, corny, or messed up.
His comeback line was so wack that the whole room groaned.
Fans called the new album wack compared to her earlier work.
Similarlame, lousy, corny, weak, bad
Oppositecool, dope, fresh, awesome
Note
Slang that began in African-American Vernacular English and now serves as an all-purpose verdict: bad, corny and uncool at once. It is most at home after a verb and is often intensified, as in so wack, straight-up wack or that's wack. It is usually traced to wacky, though a blend of white and black has also been suggested. It compares as wacker and wackest, a spelling shared with the Liverpool word behind the friendly greeting.
- 2A person regarded as eccentric, odd, or weird.
Her uncle was a harmless wack who wore mismatched socks on purpose.
The bookshop attracted all sorts of wacks, dreamers, and night owls.
Similarweirdo, oddball, eccentric, kook
Note
A noun made by trimming wacky back to a shorter form, so a wack is, quite literally, a wacky person. It takes an ordinary plural, wacks, and sits comfortably beside oddball and weirdo. Do not confuse it with the friendly term of address: that word is spelled the same but comes from wacker, "a Liverpudlian," and it signals warmth rather than a verdict on someone's oddness.
- 3A friendly term used in Liverpool to address someone, roughly equivalent to 'mate' or 'pal.'
All right, wack, how've you been keeping these days?
Give us a hand shifting these boxes, wack.
Note
A separate word from the others: it is a clipping of wacker, meaning a Liverpudlian, so the greeting in effect hails a fellow Scouser. It is used only in direct address, as in "Wot's up with you, wack?", and does the work of mate or pal. In dialogue it marks a speaker as a Liverpool man, often from the docks, which is how Douglas Reeman's Torpedo Run (2011) uses it.
Less common meaning
- 4PCP; a slang name for the drug phencyclidine, also spelled whack.
Dealers cut the wack with other powders to stretch their supply.
They got busted selling wack down by the docks last summer.
SimilarPCP
Note
Drug slang of the 1970s, it now reads as period language rather than current street talk. The spelling whack carried the same meaning, so either may turn up in writing from that era. It suits fiction or history set in that decade. In present-day speech it would sound dated, and most listeners would hear it as the adjective or the verb whack instead.
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Practice
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Origins
This is a back-formation from "wacky." Alternatively, it is possibly a blend of "white" and "black," in the sense that something may look black outside but really be white inside.
This is a clipping of "wacker," meaning a Liverpudlian, or a resident of Liverpool, England.