*Totes* is a playful short form of *totally*, meaning "completely" or "definitely" — "That is totes fine", "I'm totes exhausted", "Totes!" as a one-word yes. It belongs to a small family of chopped-off slang words (*obvs* for obviously, *probs* for probably, *def* for definitely) that got popular through teenagers, texting, and social media around 2010.

Here is the part a dictionary will not always tell you: it already sounds dated, and it is now used ironically at least as often as sincerely. Someone saying "totes amazeballs" in 2026 is almost certainly joking about how people talked fifteen years ago. So it is a word to understand rather than a word to use — if you say it in a Taiwanese classroom or an English exam it will land oddly, and in any formal writing it is simply wrong.

It is also very informal in a specific way: it is friendly, light, slightly girlish in its stereotype, and it never appears in serious sentences. You would not say "the results are totes significant" unless you were being funny on purpose.