Speak to any French person, and they would hazard a guess at meuf (from femme meaning woman) or ouf (from fou meaning crazy). However, I believe that I have found another, even better-known verlan word...
In terms of historical keystones in the use of verlan, we find that what is probably the best known verlan word (even today) originates to circa 1720. This word clearly greatly precedes verlan’s heyday, but is unquestionably the work of one of France’s most versatile writers, and certainly the most renowned French Enlightenment writer: François-Marie Arouet. The well-known Verlan word is, in fact, the writer’s very own nom de plume: Voltaire. Voltaire stems from the name of his family château in the Poitou region, named ‘Airvault’. If you then inverse the syllables of this, you have ‘vault-air’, which is phonically identical to the name Voltaire.
Although this was almost certainly not the only factor in his choice of nom de plume, it is nonetheless a fact of which Voltaire was quite aware.
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