sus

What does sus mean?

Sus is what you say when a story, a person or a situation does not add up. The tone can be playful or serious: calling your friend sus over who ate the last slice is a joke, while calling a stranger sus in a parking garage is a warning. It mostly works as an adjective, but clips and captions stretch it into a noun (the sus is off the charts) and into a one-word reaction when nobody believes you.

Where does sus come from?

Games did the heavy lifting. Among Us, released by Innersloth in 2018, made sus one of its core words when it boomed during the 2020 lockdowns, and streamers on Twitch chanted it so often that it escaped the game entirely. The shortening is older than the game, though: suss, a British slang form of suspicious or to figure something out, has been around for decades, and Among Us pushed the American spelling into the global vocabulary.

How to use sus

• He told three different versions of where he was last night. Sus.
• Our intern keeps screenshotting the shared drive at 2 a.m., which everyone finds a little sus.