Every sport develops its own slang, but hockey's vocabulary is unusually colorful — a mix of playful nicknames, borrowed terms, and phrases that have been passed down through locker rooms for generations.
Biscuit. Slang for the puck itself, likely drawing on the puck's flat, dark, roughly biscuit-shaped appearance. "Put the biscuit in the basket" has become a standard, almost cliché way of describing a goal.
Sin bin. An informal name for the penalty box, playfully framing a penalty as a small moral offense a player has to serve time for before rejoining the game.
Dangle and deke. "Deke" is short for decoy — a player faking a move in one direction before shifting the puck the other way to get past a defender. "Dangle" describes an especially flashy, confident version of the same idea, often used as a verb: to dangle someone.
Sniper. A player known for a precise, accurate shot rather than sheer power — someone who can pick a small opening in the net rather than just firing the puck as hard as possible.
Barn. Old-school slang for an arena or rink, evoking the plain, sometimes cold and drafty look of older community hockey buildings before modern arenas became the norm.
Chirping. Trash talk exchanged between players during a game — usually quick, needling one-liners rather than anything approaching a real argument.
None of these terms are official anywhere, and nobody had to approve them. They spread the way most sports slang does: through locker rooms, broadcasts, and fans repeating what they heard, until the language became as much a part of the sport as the rules themselves.