What does “verlan” mean in French?

Verlan is a French slang that flips the syllables of a word, mostly used by young people. The clearest example is hiding in plain sight: the singer Stromae is just maestro with its syllables turned around (mae-stro to stro-mae). Once you hear the trick, you can decode it everywhere, and ordinary French words suddenly have a secret, backwards twin.

The word verlan is itself an example of the rule: it comes from l’envers (“the reverse”), with l’en-vers flipped to ver-lan — a name that does exactly what it describes. You’ll meet it constantly in everyday speech: français becomes céfran, femme becomes meuf, fou becomes ouf. An old underworld code revived in the immigrant neighbourhoods of the Paris suburbs, it was carried into the mainstream by rap and film from the 1980s on — once a near-secret slang, now everyday youth speech. Stromae leaned into the game from the start — before settling on the name, he rapped as “Opmaestro.”