Toronto Talk & Fillers Slang

This is conversational glue — words and tags that hold a sentence together in everyday GTA speech.

14 words in this category

• 'Llow It — Short for "allow it" — let it go, don't worry about it, drop the subject.
• Ahlie — A tag question meaning "right?" or "isn't that so?" — tacked onto the end of a statement to get agreement.
• Chirping / Chirp — Trash talk — an insult or dig thrown at someone, especially rooted in Canadian hockey culture where players "chirp" opponents. In everyday Toronto speech it just means friendly (or not-so-friendly) roasting.
• Deadass — Seriously, no joke — used to stress that you mean exactly what you said.
• Dry — Blunt, unenthusiastic or straight-up boring — describing a person's response or a whole situation with no energy to it.
• For Tru — "For real" — used to confirm something is genuinely true.
• Hooooly — A drawn-out exclamation for when something needs a reaction — shock, disbelief, or someone getting on your nerves.
• Mans — Used as a stand-in for "I" or "me" — a self-referential term believed to come from Jamaican Patois as spoken in Toronto's Caribbean communities. The whole "Toronto mans" identity is built around this word.
• Nize — To be quiet or stop talking — an imperative, usually heard as "nize that" or "nize your beaks" (beaks meaning mouths).
• No Cap — "No lie" — "cap" means a lie, so "no cap" means you're telling the truth.
• Styll — An emphatic filler used at the end of a sentence for emphasis, similar to "though" or "for real."
• Ting — Literally "thing" in Patois, but used constantly for a romantic interest ("my ting") or just to refer to an unspecified person, object or situation.
• Wagwan — "What's going on?" / "What's up?" — one of the most common Patois-rooted greetings heard across the GTA.
• Wallahi — "I swear to God" in Arabic — used constantly across the GTA thanks to the city's large Somali and Arab communities, well beyond just those speaking Arabic at home.

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