drip

Drip praises the outfit. That is the useful thing about it, because most style words praise the person. Saying someone has drip points at the shoes, the chain, the fit of the jacket, and at the taste behind those choices.

It carries money in it. Drip usually implies the pieces cost something, or at least look like they did. A thrifted outfit can have drip, but the word still reaches for a sense of expense that a plain word like stylish does not.

You will meet it as an adjective too. Someone dripped out is wearing the whole look, head to toe, on purpose.

The word had an older slang life that ran the other way. For most of the twentieth century a drip was a boring or feeble person. Younger speakers rarely use it that way now. The two senses do not really collide either. The style sense almost always turns up as something you have, not something you are.

The exact origin is unclear, and no coiner is documented. Three separate claims circulate, and each belongs to whoever makes it rather than to the record.

A hip-hop outlet places the style sense in the Atlanta rap scene of the 2000s. A 2018 Urban Dictionary entry credits early 2010s Jersey City instead. The Houston rapper Sauce Walka has said he popularised the usage himself on a 2014 mixtape, which is a claim by an interested party and not an attestation.

What is documented is when it went mainstream, because the chart record is public. The word appeared in a run of major rap releases across 2017 and 2018, including a Cardi B single named for it in April 2018. In September 2018 Gunna and Lil Baby released a track built around the word. It reached number four on the Hot 100, was certified Diamond in 2022, and was nominated for a Grammy in 2020.

The word belongs to hip-hop and to African American Vernacular English, which is where reference works place it. The plain English word is far older, and the slang sense borrows the image of something flowing off you.