Dating slang in 2026: what people mean, and which words are mostly online.

A situationship is more than friends and less than a relationship, and nobody has said out loud which way it's heading. If someone uses the word about you, that's usually what they mean. It's also the clearest example of how dating slang works now: someone names a thing everyone already recognised, the name spreads because it saves a paragraph of explaining, and a year later your aunt is using it.

Not every term gets that far (has anyone ever said "floodlighting" to your face?). Some of the words below you'll hear from friends at the pub. Others turn up mostly in videos and trend pieces, and we've said so where that's the case. We've left out anything we weren't sure people use.

The ones you'll hear in real conversations

• Situationship: see above. Often used a bit ruefully, after the fact.
• Talking stage: the bit before dating, when you're messaging a lot and maybe meeting up but nobody's calling it anything. Can last a week. Can last, somehow, five months.
• Ghosting: ending things by disappearing. No message, no explanation, just silence. Old enough now that it's in ordinary use, including for friends and job applications.
• Left on read: they've seen your message (the app or phone tells you) and haven't replied.
• Dry texter: someone whose replies are "yeah", "lol" and "haha nice". Not always a lack of interest. Some people are dry texters and lively in person.
• The ick: a sudden, often unfair turn-off. Someone chasing a dropped hat across a car park. Saying "yummy". You can't argue someone out of an ick, which is sort of the point of the word.
• Rizz: charm, the ability to attract someone, usually through how you talk. Oxford named it word of the year for 2023, and it hasn't gone anywhere since.
• Delulu: short for delusional, used affectionately about yourself when you're a bit too hopeful about a crush ("he liked my story, we're basically engaged"). As far as we can tell it started in K-pop fan circles. "Delulu is the solulu" is the jokey motto.
• Cuffing season: autumn and winter, when people supposedly want to settle down with someone for the cold months. Used half-seriously every October.
• Red flags and green flags: warning signs and good signs. We've written a whole piece on green flags over text, because they're more useful to look for than people think.

Ways people half-disappear

English has a surprising number of words for "not quite leaving".

• Breadcrumbing: sending just enough attention (a like on your story, a "we should get a drink sometime") to keep you interested, without ever following through.
• Orbiting: they've stopped talking to you, but they still watch every story you post. Out of your life, still in your views list.
• Zombieing: a ghost comes back from the dead with a message like "hey stranger" as if nothing happened. If this is you and you'd like to do it better, try our piece on restarting a dead conversation.
• Benching: keeping someone as an option while you see who else is around. Warm enough to keep them on the team, not warm enough to put them on the pitch.
• Cushioning: while in a relationship, keeping a few other people on the go so that if it ends, the landing's softer.

These overlap a lot, and people use them loosely, so somebody who tells you they're being benched might well mean breadcrumbed, or orbited, or just that the other person is slow at replying, and in our experience nobody at the table will correct them.

Flags in other colours

Red and green weren't enough, apparently.

• Beige flags: small quirks that aren't good or bad, just a bit odd. Only eats the corners of lasagne. Names every houseplant. It came out of TikTok and caught on, and it's also sometimes used to mean a profile that's so bland there's nothing to go on.
• Pink flags: something that isn't a dealbreaker but is worth noticing. They're rude to waiters once. They mention their ex a lot. You'll see this one on TikTok more than you'll hear it said out loud.

The social media ones

• Soft launch: hinting that you're seeing someone without showing who. Two glasses of wine on a table, or a hand on a steering wheel that clearly isn't yours.
• Hard launch: posting them properly, face and all. Often a big deal in a way that's slightly silly to explain to anyone over forty.
• Pocketing: keeping the person you're seeing away from your friends and family, and off your socials. Sometimes it's a reasonable wish for privacy. Sometimes it's not a good sign.

One worth taking seriously

Love bombing: overwhelming someone with attention, compliments, gifts and big plans very early on. It feels great, which is why people struggle to see it. But people mean more by it than early enthusiasm. It usually describes intensity that's later used to pressure or control someone. It's fine to slow things down if something feels like too much too fast.

Newer ones, mostly seen online

We've marked these honestly. You'll find them in trend articles and on TikTok, and some have real traction among people in their twenties, but you're less likely to hear them over a drink.

• Roaching: hiding that you're seeing lots of other people, so when it comes out, there are more than you'd assumed. Named after the cockroach logic: if you see one, there are more.
• Floodlighting: oversharing something heavy very early, partly to test whether the other person sticks around.
• Hardballing: being blunt from the start about what you want, whether that's marriage and kids or something casual. Before someone gave it a name, this was called being clear.
• Textationship: a connection that lives almost entirely in the chat and never quite turns into meeting up.
• Kittenfishing: a milder catfish. Photos from five years ago, a couple of centimetres added. Not a fake person, just a generously edited one.

Catfishing itself (pretending to be someone you're not online) is old enough to be in the first list. We mention it here because on Itclickt it doesn't come up the same way. Everyone on it is an AI companion, we tell you that before you sign up, and if you sincerely ask a companion whether it's an AI, it'll say yes. That makes it a relaxed place to try out the vocabulary, or argue about it.

Lena is a junior UX designer in Berlin whose bachelor thesis was on dating-app behaviour, so she has opinions. She's wrong about cushioning, though.