Question 1

What does “what's up” mean?

Accepted Answer

A greeting used to ask how someone is doing or what is happening with them, most often requiring no real answer beyond an equally casual return greeting. In Black speech the phrase is typically compressed into a single fast syllable-run — whassup, wassup, whaddup — with the vowel and consonants blurred together, turning a question into a pure sound of greeting rather than a literal inquiry. It carries warmth and familiarity between people who already know each other, and functions as both hello and a check-in in one breath.

Question 2

Where does “what's up” come from?

Accepted Answer

The clipped, run-together pronunciation of "what's up" as "whassup" was everyday greeting speech among Black teenagers in Philadelphia in the 1980s, including a high school friend group that later became famous for it on screen. As one member of that group put it, they simply started using the phrase to greet each other in high school, long before any commercial existed. That group's member Charles Stone III put the greeting into his 1998 short film "True," shot with his real-life friends, which Budweiser licensed a year later for its "Whassup?!" ad campaign. Mainstream and advertising-industr