Your kid hurls a sock across the room and shouts "yeet." An hour later it's the TV remote. By bedtime you have heard the word more times than you can count, and you still have no idea what it means.
So here it is. Yeet means to throw something, hard and with full commitment, usually for no good reason at all. It can also mean yes, or excitement, or nothing in particular, and that is exactly how it is supposed to work.
What yeet actually means
Yeet is a verb first. To yeet is to throw something with maximum force and no concern for where it lands. The dramatic launch is the whole point.
It slipped its leash a long time ago, though. Now a kid yeets out of bed in the morning, yeets their homework into a backpack, and fires off a single "YEET" in the group chat to mean let's go. Throw, yes, pure energy, all under one word, and you can see the full range at yeet.
Yeet isn't a word your kid made up to confuse you. It escaped the internet and moved into your living room.
One quirk worth knowing. The past tense is not "yeeted." Half the internet swears it's "yote." They are mostly joking. Mostly.
One word, a whole dialect
Yeet almost never travels alone. A kid who is yeeting things is probably also telling you dinner is bussin, which means genuinely delicious, calling cap when someone lies, swearing no cap when they are dead serious, and rating a stranger's rizz, the charm and nerve it takes to flirt.
The rest runs deeper than a vocabulary list. There's skibidi, which can mean good, bad, or nothing at all depending on the sentence around it. There's sigma for the admired loner, delulu for someone happily kidding themselves, and the ick for that sudden cold flash of disgust at a person you used to like. Each one does a job the dictionary you grew up with never had a word for.
Where it actually came from
Yeet did not start in your kid's friend group. It started with a 2014 video and a dance, got carried by Vine, jumped to TikTok, and crossed the planet in a matter of months.
That is how modern slang moves. A word is born on one app, mutates across a dozen languages, and turns up in a Berlin schoolyard and a São Paulo group chat in the same week. By the time it reaches your kitchen table it has already been around the world. Your kid is fluent in the most international dialect on earth and can't explain a single word of it to you.
Should you be worried
No. A kid reaching for slang is just a kid doing what every generation before them did.
You once said things that made your own parents flinch. Slang is how kids mark a space as theirs, signal who is in the group, and play with language before anyone hands them the rules. The words turn over every few years, but the instinct behind them never does. The worst thing you can do is ban the words. The second worst is to start using them yourself at dinner.
Get curious, not fluent
You do not need to yeet your own laundry to keep up. You just need to stop treating the words as a wall between you and your kid.
Next time one lands, ask what it means and watch them light up at being the expert for once. Better still, look it up together. That is exactly why Linguin keeps yeet and rizz on the same shelf as petrichor and Shakespeare. It is all one language, and the word your kid yelled this morning is every bit as real as the ones on the spelling test.
You will never be fluent in their slang, and you were never meant to be. Understanding it is the part that counts, and that part is well within reach.