Image: Pexels by Paul Basel
About This Quiz
It's hard not to have a soft spot for hot rods if you have any love for cars at all. They're cars taken to the next level, souped up, tricked out and looking better than the day they rolled out of the factory and down the highway for the first time. A hot rod can be anything from a vintage Mustang to a Frankenstein car made of whatever parts fit together and produce intense power and speed. Some are kit cars you assemble for yourself; others are loving restorations made from all original parts. Regardless of how they're made, if you want to drive in their world, you need to know the lingo that makes it all work. Nothing is as simple as a muffler or a supercharger, not when you can say a flamethrower or a blower!
Hot rod slang is as colorful as the hot rods themselves. From zoomies in the exhaust to a bugcatcher on the hood and a mother-in-law seat hanging out in the back, there are a lot of cool phrases to add some flair. So if you know your wheelie bars and your baloneys, or why you'd want a nerf bar and a glasspack, take the quiz and prove it!
Replicar
Rat rod
Deuce
Baby moon
A baby moon hubcap is a small, chrome cap that only covers the center as opposed to the entire inside of the wheel. If you had a full chrome hubcap, it would be called a moon or a full moon.
Advertisement
Big n' little
Hot licks
A classic car like a hot rod needs a classic paint job, and a popular motif for many hot rods involved custom flames painted on the hood or sides of a car. Those flames are called hot licks for obvious reasons.
Bugcatchers
Cams
Advertisement
Merc
Goat
Puke can
The proper name for something like this is a catch can or an overflow tank, but we're talking slang here, and that means we're talking about a puke can. If the radiator gets too hot and overflows, it pukes up excess liquid, and this can is there to catch it
Blue oval
Advertisement
Glasspacks
Hot licks
Mags
Mags is a slang term for alloy wheels because the specific alloy from which many wheels are made often contain magnesium. Magnesium wheels are lighter and just look better than pure steel wheels.
Lake pipes
Advertisement
Chopped
A car is chopped when you chop the top down by cutting the pillars and shaving the windows. The roof is lowered to give the car a flatter and smaller appearance. It can make it a bit more difficult to drive a car if the chopping is dramatic.
Slammed
Crunked
Dunked
Advertisement
Roughie
Woody
Lowrider
A lowrider has been lowered on a hydraulic system so that the body of the car can be raised and lowered. Often when a lowrider is lowered all the way down, it can't be driven, so it needs to rise up again to get moving.
Trailer queen
Advertisement
Able
Regged
Pro street
Pro street cars are street legal cars that have been modified to resemble pro stock cars. The rear wheels are large but also tucked in so they look slightly recessed from the frame of the car.
Flat rate
Advertisement
Bullets
Nerf bar
Puke can
Mother-in-law seat
The mother-in-law seat, or rumble seat, wasn't inside the car. It was mounted on the exterior and could fold into the back of some models. It looked a lot like a sofa mounted on the rear of the car.
Advertisement
Banger
A four-cylinder engine is a four banger, just as an eight-cylinder engine is an eight banger. The piston bangs in the cylinder when the engine is working, and the fuel-air mix ignites, hence the name.
Ringer
Header
Ticker
Advertisement
Nos
Nos is such a common abbreviation for a nitrous oxide system, there's even a popular brand of energy drinks that uses the same name. Nitrous oxide splits into nitrogen and oxygen at high temperatures, so when you burn it in an engine, it adds oxygen and boosts combustion, making the car go faster.
Quidditch
Sugar
Spice
Advertisement
Blue Oval
Bow tie
Chevy cars are sometimes called bow ties because of the Chevy logo. No one knows exactly what the Chevy logo is supposed to be as there are three popular stories. One says the co-founder saw the symbol in French wallpaper. His daughter says he just doodled it on a napkin, and his wife says he once saw it in a newspaper.
Merc
Biter
Advertisement
Lake pipes
Beacher
Woody
Woodies were made of wood, just like the name says. Not entirely, of course, but wood was long used to supplement a car's frame back in the day, and woodies had panels in natural woodgrain on the side of the car.
Slammer
Advertisement
Mountain motor
Buster
Rider
Sleeper
A sleeper is a bit of automotive trickery. This happens when someone goes out of their way to soup up a car that was never meant to be a performance car, like installing a high-powered motor in a Ford Tempo or a Gremlin.
Advertisement
Sleeper
Steelies
Baloneys
There are a lot of fun ways to use the term baloneys when describing the tires on a hot rod. You can say someone is really drying the baloneys when they're going fast, or that you plan to roast the baloneys, if you're planning to win a race.
Teardrops
Advertisement
Beacher
Crank
Mill
Internal combustion engine is a bit of a mouthful, but a slang term that means the same thing is mill. It doesn't refer to any specific kind of engine, like a V8 or a straight six. It's just any engine that can make a car run.
Stinger
Advertisement
Rooked
Slammed
A slammed car is lowered to a sometimes preposterous degree. Some slammed cars will have wheels at an angle to make it look legitimately like the car was crushed and the axles buckled. A slammed car cannot get any lower and still be functional.
Opaled
Crested
Advertisement
Alky
Alky is the quick and easy way to describe any alcohol-based fuel, such as methanol or methyl alcohol, that can run a car. It's also a term that can describe a car that runs on that kind of fuel.
Awful awful
Rake
Slushbox
Advertisement
Rickets
Bundles
Glasspacks
Glasspacks are a kind of muffler that has a center tube through which exhaust passes and a larger tube around it packed with fiberglass. Ironically, they are not particularly good at muffling noise at all.
Arches
Advertisement
Lowboys
Hairpins
Big n' littles
Some drag racers and hot rods can be tweaked so that the rear tires are extremely large to provide traction while the front tires are incredibly small so they reduce resistance when the car is in motion. It also just looks dramatic.
Mags
Advertisement
Holly hock
Glasspack
Nerf bar
Nerf bars run the length of a car between the front and rear wheels and protrude a few inches from the frame. They're used to buffer a car if another car gets too close during a race and prevent body damage as well as the tires from getting tangled.
Ridgie
Advertisement
Stoat
Float
Boat
Goat
Today "goat" might stand for "greatest of all time." Back in the day, it was a nickname for the Pontiac GTO because, like a goat, the GTO could eat anything. And pronouncing GTO isn't easy, but saying goat is.
Advertisement
Lake pipes
Lakes pipes run under the rocker panels and can travel down nearly the full length of the body of a car before angling off to vent exhaust out of the side of the car. They have less back pressure than normal exhaust and offer a slight performance boost as a result.
Bullets
Gennie
Gasser
Advertisement
Cricket
Ridge
Deuce
The hot rodding variant of a 1932 Ford coupe is called a Deuce in honor of the "2" in "32." The specific model year of that car was a favorite for hot rodders because it was cheap and available with a powerful V8 engine.
Holder
Advertisement
Skins
Bullets
Flamethrowers
Flamethrowers are tailpipes that live up to their name by shooting fire out of the back of your car. Anything that controls the flow of exhaust, like a catalytic converter, will prevent them from working. But if you have a manual choke, you can get them to work by igniting the fumes as they leave the car.
Screamers
Advertisement
Goat
Skirt
Leadsled
A leadsled was typically made from a car in the late '40s or early '50s. It was lowered on the frame to make it a lowrider, and then the body was reshaped and welded with lead to cover up the damage to the bodywork in the reshaping, hence the name.
Brindle
Advertisement
Zoomies
Zoomies are side-mounted headers that point upwards. Headers are generally easy to install on any car and help improve the overall performance by allowing exhaust to escape more easily and, in the case of zoomies, they just look cool.
Bullets
Moons
Baloneys
Advertisement
Jets
Backpacks
Wings
Fender skirts
Fender skirts are not often seen in modern cars but were very popular in older models favored by hot rod enthusiasts. They partially obscure the rear tires of a car, making them look a bit like a half-closed eye.
Advertisement
Fade aways
Fade away fenders were popular for custom cars, especially in the 1940s. The design saw them slope back down away from the wheel and into the car, making them look — as the name suggests — as though they are fading into the body of the car.
Trundles
Base lines
Wickets
Advertisement
Burped
Lunched
When a car has been lunched, it has been destroyed or wrecked. It's also a surfing term that means essentially the same thing. If you wiped out on a surfboard, you got lunched.
Scored
Roped
Advertisement
Louvre
Drain
Hoover
Bugcatcher
Cars like the Plymouth Road Runner and the Ferrari Testarossa have prominent hood scoops or bugcatchers which, when functional, allow air to flow over a large engine to help cool it. A lot of scoops are just for show, however, and serve no real purpose.
Advertisement
Spotter
Blotter
Rigger
Digger
You can't drag race without a dragster, and you can't spend your entire life calling it a dragster. Digger is another popular term for dragsters that has been around for years. If you want to know why, join the club! The origin seems to be lost to history.
Advertisement
A-bomb
Ford built the Model A from 1927 to 1931. An A-Bomb is therefore a Model A that has been blown up with some modifications. If it hasn't been modified, you can call it an A-bone instead of an A-bomb.
Anglebox
Crate
Mouse
Advertisement
Bullets
Dagmars, or bullets, are chrome cones on the bumpers of some cars produced in the '50s. The use of the term bullets to describe them is self-explanatory. The word "Dagmar" was a reference to a certain actress popular in the era. The relation to her is a bit unseemly.
Hairpins
Digits
Nuggets
Advertisement
Caddy
Beach wagon
A beach wagon was a variant of a station wagon which, as the name implies, was meant for driving to the beach. They were heavily marketed in the New England area as leisure vehicles for day trips to the beach.
Fade away
Jimmy
Advertisement
Laughing gas
Laughing gas is one of many nicknames for a nitrous system, not just inside cars but pretty much anywhere. Nitrous is used as a sedative at the dentist, and it gets its name because exposure to it can make you feel a bit silly.
Duster
Fog
Canny
Advertisement
You Got:
/35
.jpg){kind=link}
.jpg){kind=link}
.jpg){kind=link}
.jpg){kind=link}
_,_Dutch_licence_registration_DH-06-25_pic8.JPG){kind=link}
.jpg){kind=link}
