Phat

Part of speech: adjective

Definitions

Slang meaning excellent, impressive, or very cool, especially in music, style, or fashion
Informal praise describing something outstanding, stylish, or highly appealing to others
Used colloquially to describe something that is superb, fashionable, or remarkably good

Etymology: "Pretty Hot And Tempting," runs the explanation passed around schoolyards and message boards, and it is wrong. Like most tidy acronym origins, it was fitted to the word after the fact. The real story is simpler: phat is "fat" in a new spelling, which is commonly explained as a way to mark its approving sense. "Fat" itself goes back to Old English "fætt," originally a past participle of a verb meaning to cram or stuff: a fattened thing. From early on it led a second, approving life. The King James Bible promises "the fat of the land," and English has long spoken of fat profits, fat purses and fat jobs. Fat meant plenty, and plenty was good. But those senses belonged to money and harvests, not to people. Said of a person, the plain word was rarely a compliment. In American slang the approving sense went further. By 1951 "fat" was recorded with a positive meaning, something like rich, hot or desirable. Then, by the 1970s, African American speakers were using the respelled form. It was first said of a woman, meaning sexy and attractive, and especially a curvaceous, well-endowed one. Here the old contradiction became the point: a word that elsewhere could wound now carried open admiration for a full figure. Spoken aloud, the two words are identical, so any difference lived on the page. The "ph" is often explained as a way to separate praise from insult, signalling the good kind of fat, though the exact origin of the spelling is uncertain. Whatever its purpose, it gave a street word the Greek dress of "philosophy" and "phantom," though it had never been anywhere near Greece. Through the 1990s, hip-hop carried the respelled word out of local slang and into lyrics, magazines and the mouths of teenagers who had never heard the older usage. Along the way its meaning widened from an attractive body to anything excellent: a beat, a car, a pair of sneakers. The acronym explanations came later, as folk etymology fitted to the unusual spelling.

Synonyms: awesome, cool, dope, fresh, fly

Antonyms: lame, terrible, awful