The Words in the Group Chat, Explained

Most of the words in a meme coin group chat are jokes, insults or noise. About three of them carry real information. This page tells you which is which, in plain English.

The first hour in a new group chat is genuinely disorienting. People are typing full sentences at each other and you cannot parse any of it. That is not a knowledge gap you need to close before you are allowed to be there.

Almost none of it is technical. It is a dialect made of typos, in-jokes and insults, and the technical words hiding inside it are the ones worth learning. So here they are grouped by what they are actually for, rather than alphabetically.

The words for what the price just did

This is the largest group and the least useful one.

Pump means the price went up quickly. Dump means it went down quickly. Mooning means it went up a lot. Rekt is a deliberate misspelling of wrecked, and it means somebody lost a lot of money.

ATH is short for all time high, the highest price the token has ever traded at.

You will also see red candle and green candle, which are the coloured bars on a price chart. Red means the price finished that period lower than it started. Green means higher.

One word needs care. On its own, pump describes a fast rise. Joined to dump, a pump and dump is a scam: people inflate a price with hype, then sell into the buyers they attracted.

Every one of these words describes something that has already finished happening. None of them tells you anything at all about what comes next, even when the person typing it very clearly believes otherwise.

That is the most useful thing on this page, so it gets a diagram to itself.

Every price word in the chat is a report on the past wearing the clothes of a forecast.

Read them as weather reports. Somebody saying the price pumped is telling you it rained, not that you should have packed an umbrella.

The words for what people did with their money

This group describes behaviour, and it is where the chat gets judgemental.

To ape is to buy something quickly without looking into it first. People say it about themselves, usually cheerfully, and it is a description of a decision rather than a recommendation of one.

Bags means the tokens somebody is holding. A bagholder is someone still holding after the price fell, and it is mildly unkind.

Paper hands means someone sold quickly. Diamond hands means someone did not sell through a fall. Jeet is a harsher word aimed at the same thing as paper hands, and it is an insult rather than a description.

Notice what these six words have in common. Every one of them is a judgement on a decision somebody else made about their own money, delivered by a person who does not know their circumstances.

The chat has a mocking name for buying too fast and a mocking name for selling too early. It has no name at all for the ordinary act of looking something up before deciding.

A dark stone market hall lit by one hanging lamp. On the left an upright tabby cat in a black hoodie and heavy gold medallion pushes a large heap of gold coins across a wooden counter, coins spilling off the edge. On the right, in a narrow doorway into darkness, a second tabby cat crouches clutching one small gold coin in both paws. — The chat has a mocking word for each of these two and no word at all for reading the counter first.

Here is the part that matters, and it is the reason this section exists at all.

Diamond hands is presented as a compliment, and underneath the joke it is telling you to keep holding something while it falls. That is a decision about your own money, and no group chat is in a position to make it for you.

Treat every one of them as a thing people say, never as a thing you should do. Somebody calling you a jeet for selling has told you nothing about whether selling was right. They have told you they wanted you to keep holding.

The words people call each other

This group carries no information at all, which is worth knowing so you stop trying to decode it.

Degen is short for degenerate and describes someone who takes very large risks. It is used as a compliment far more often than as a warning.

Anon means anyone whose real name is unknown, which is most people in the room. Fren is friend, misspelled on purpose. Ser is sir, misspelled on purpose. GM is good morning and gets typed at all hours of the day and night.

The misspellings are the point rather than a mistake. Typing a word wrong on purpose is a cheap way of showing you have been around long enough to know the local spelling, which is why there are so many of them.

Here is the whole group in one table, with the only column that matters on the right.

What you see	What it means	What it tells you
gm	Good morning	Nothing
fren, ser, anon	Friend, sir, stranger	Nothing
degen	Takes very big risks	Nothing, and it is meant fondly
LFG	An excited shout	Somebody is excited
WAGMI	We are gonna make it	Somebody is hopeful
NGMI	Not gonna make it	Somebody is being rude

WAGMI and NGMI stand for we are gonna make it and not gonna make it. Kraken’s own explainer of the two words makes the useful point that they reflect mood and rarely offer any meaningful insight.

None of this is a test. You can type gm back on day one and nobody will know you arrived that morning.

The words that are actually warnings

Now the small group that carries weight. These are the words where the chat tells you something you can check.

Rug or rugged means the people behind a token took the money and left, so holders were unable to sell at any sensible price. It is the specific accusation to take seriously, and what a rug pull actually is covers how they work.

Dev sold means somebody believes the people who created the token have sold their own holdings. CA is short for contract address, the long string of letters and numbers that identifies one exact token and separates it from every copy using the same name.

A honeypot is a token you can buy but cannot sell, because whoever built it made selling impossible for everyone but themselves. The word is used loosely, so treat it as a prompt to check rather than as a finding.

Three of these are worth stopping for, and each one points at something you can go and confirm without asking anybody’s permission.

Three words, three things you can go and verify yourself in a couple of minutes.

CTO stands for community takeover and means the original creators walked away and holders kept the project going. It is a real thing that happens, and it is also a badge some tools sell, which what a community takeover actually is goes through properly.

DYOR is do your own research and NFA is not financial advice. Both started as genuine caution and both now get typed at the end of enthusiastic messages, which rather defeats the purpose.

To shill a token is to promote it while holding it. Everyone in a token group chat is doing this to some degree, including the people who accuse others of it.

HODL started as a typo

One piece of history, because it explains more about this dialect than any definition can.

HODL is usually explained as an acronym for hold on for dear life. It is not one. It began as a straightforward misspelling of holding.

The real version is better. Somebody was up late, watching the price of their bitcoin fall, and wrote a long and slightly drunk forum post about why he was not going to sell. He misspelled the title, noticed immediately that he had misspelled it, and posted it anyway rather than fix it. More than a decade later the whole industry uses his typo.

Deep night in a wood panelled study. A tabby cat in a rumpled black hoodie and heavy gold medallion has fallen asleep with his head resting on an old mechanical typewriter, one paw still on the carriage, lit by a single brass desk lamp, surrounded by an overturned mug, a stopped clock and crumpled sheets of paper. — The most quoted word in the dialect was a mistake made by somebody who should have gone to bed.

On 18 December 2013 a user called GameKyuubi posted to the Bitcoin forum under the title I AM HODLING. The first line of the post reads “I type d that tyitle twice because I knew it was wrong the first time.” The phrase hold on for dear life appears nowhere in it.

The acronym was invented afterwards to explain a typo that had already caught on. That is the whole dialect in one story, and it is worth remembering the next time a word in the chat sounds like it must mean something precise.

The three words worth acting on

If you take one thing from all of this, take the shortlist.

When somebody says rug, check whether people can still sell. When somebody says dev sold, look at who holds the most. When somebody posts a CA, compare it against a source you already trusted before you use it.

Everything else is atmosphere. Cheerful atmosphere, mostly, and nothing wrong with that. It is not information.

To run those checks yourself, how to check any Solana token yourself walks through each one with nothing to install.

If you remember one thing

The chat sounds like a specialist field for about a day. It is mostly typos and mood.

Learn the three warning words, ignore the insults about how other people handled their own money, and type gm on your first morning. Nobody is checking credentials at the door.

If the token itself is what you want to look into next, the five checks that actually matter is the place to start. And what a seed phrase actually is covers the one thing here you cannot undo.