98 Fun Facts About Slang

"OK" first appeared in print in 1839 as a jokey abbreviation of what?

The Boston Morning Post printed OK on 23 March 1839 as a jokey abbreviation of 'oll korrect', riding a fad for comic misspellings of common phrases.

Which US president's 1840 campaign nickname helped make "OK" a national word?

Martin Van Buren's 1840 re-election campaign played on 'Old Kinderhook', after his New York birthplace, and its 'OK Clubs' helped spread the abbreviation; he lost the election, but the word stuck.

When "dude" became New York's vogue word in 1883, what did it mean?

A fussily dressed man, a New York dandy, was the dude of 1883; the word then shifted to mean an Eastern city slicker holidaying out West, which is where the 'dude ranch' comes from.

The modern slang sense of "cool" is credited to which saxophonist?

Lester Young, the tenor star of Count Basie's band, is said to have spread 'cool' as praise among fellow musicians; he also named Billie Holiday 'Lady Day', and she called him 'Prez', the president.

"Bling bling" went mainstream after a 1999 B.G. single on which New Orleans label?

Cash Money released B.G.'s 'Bling Bling' in 1999 with the Hot Boys, Lil Wayne among them; the word spread so widely that mainstream dictionaries, Merriam-Webster among them, later gave it an entry.

Which New York landmark is the most popular explanation for the 1906 fad phrase '23 skidoo'?

The Flatiron Building, at 23rd Street, funnelled gusts that lifted women's skirts; police supposedly told gawking men to 'skidoo', hence '23 skidoo'.

"The bee's knees" and "the cat's meow" were approving slang used by which fashionable young women?

Flappers used both in the 1920s; their slang also included 'I have to see a man about a dog', a Prohibition-era excuse for slipping away to buy whiskey.

"Groovy" comes from which world before hippies got hold of it?

Jazz musicians said a player was 'in the groove' when performing superbly, and 'groovy' grew out of that phrase decades before the 1960s counterculture adopted it as all-purpose praise.

Who voiced the 'gag me with a spoon' chatter on Frank Zappa's 1982 hit 'Valley Girl'?

His daughter Moon Unit, then 14, improvised the monologue; Zappa meant the song to mock San Fernando Valley teenagers, but it became his biggest single and spread their slang far beyond Los Angeles.

In Cockney rhyming slang, what are a person's "plates of meat"?

Their feet: 'plates of meat' rhymes with feet, and speakers usually drop the rhyming word, so tired feet are just 'plates', the way stairs become 'the apples' from apples and pears.

In the Cockney advice to "use your ___", the missing word is short for which rhyme for "head"?

Bread, as in loaf of bread, rhymes with head; speakers drop the rhyming word and keep only 'loaf', so 'use your loaf' simply means think.

What does a Cockney mean by a "Ruby Murray"?

A curry: Cockneys borrowed the name of Ruby Murray, a Northern Irish singer and 1950s chart star, purely because Murray rhymes with curry; she is said to have found the tribute amusing.

Traditionally, a true Cockney is someone born within earshot of which church's bells?

St Mary-le-Bow on Cheapside houses the Bow Bells; 'Cockney' is usually traced to Middle English cokeney, a 'cock's egg', first a taunt for a pampered child and later for soft townsfolk.

Polari, the secret slang of British gay men, reached a mass audience through which 1960s BBC radio comedy?

Round the Horne's Julian and Sandy, played by Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams, peppered their sketches with Polari; that fame helped end its use as a secret code, and it faded after the law changed in 1967.

Which everyday British word is thought to come from Polari?

Naff, meaning dull or tacky, is thought to be Polari, in which a 'naff omi' was a dreary man; in 1982 Princess Anne was reported to have told photographers at a horse trial to 'naff off'.

What is an 'esky' in Australian slang?

A portable cooler: 'esky' began as the Esky brand of the Sydney firm Malley's, used first on ice chests and then on a cool box for the car boot, and Australians now say it of any cooler.

The Australian slang word "yakka", meaning hard work, was borrowed from where?

Yagara, an Aboriginal tongue of the Brisbane region, supplied 'yaga', to work; recorded from the 1840s, it passed through colonial pidgin into Australian English and survives mostly in the phrase 'hard yakka'.

What is a "dunny" to a Sydneysider?

A dunny is a toilet, originally an outdoor one; the word comes from the old British dialect term dunnekin for a privy.

In British English "pissed" usually means what?

In Britain pissed means drunk, as in 'pissed as a newt'; Americans use it for annoyed, which is why 'pissed off' travels better.

Ask for a 'rubber' in an American office and you will most likely be understood to want what?

A condom is the American reading; in Britain a rubber is the thing on the end of a pencil, a gap that has confused generations of classrooms.

Which British politician signed texts "LOL", believing it meant "lots of love"?

David Cameron signed some texts to Rebekah Brooks 'LOL' until she told him it meant 'laugh out loud', as she revealed to the Leveson Inquiry in 2012, a year after the Oxford English Dictionary listed the acronym.

The earliest known use of "OMG" is in a 1917 letter to which politician?

Winston Churchill was sent it by Admiral Lord Fisher, who obligingly spelled it out, 'O.M.G. (Oh! My God!)', and later printed the letter in his own memoirs.

Which rapper's 2011 single 'The Motto' turned the acronym YOLO into a global catchphrase?

Drake's 2011 single 'The Motto', featuring Lil Wayne, turned 'you only live once' into a hook; a year later he grumbled that stores were selling YOLO merchandise without cutting him in.

The acronym FOMO was popularised by a 2004 article in the student magazine of which institution?

Harvard Business School student Patrick McGinnis wrote in its paper, The Harbus, that two fears ruled campus social life: FOMO and its twin FOBO, the fear of a better option.

Which word, Oxford's Word of the Year for 2013, was first recorded on an Australian online forum in 2002?

Selfie first appeared when an Australian posted a blurry photo of the lip he split at a friend's 21st and apologised that 'it was a selfie'; twerk and binge-watch were on Oxford's shortlist that year.

Which emoji did Oxford Dictionaries name its Word of the Year for 2015?

The face-with-tears-of-joy emoji won because a study by Oxford and the keyboard firm SwiftKey found it was the most used emoji in the world that year.

Despite the echo of "emotion", the Japanese word "emoji" literally combines words meaning what?

Picture and character: e plus moji, so the likeness to 'emotion' and 'emoticon' is pure coincidence. Shigetaka Kurita drew a famous set of 176 for NTT DoCoMo in 1999.

In 1982 Scott Fahlman proposed which way to mark jokes online?

The sideways smiley :-) was Fahlman's fix for jokes being taken seriously on a Carnegie Mellon bulletin board; in the same post he offered :-( for marking the remarks that were not jokes.

"Rizz", Oxford's Word of the Year for 2023, is thought to be a shortening of which word?

Charisma: Oxford traces rizz to the word's middle syllable, a rare clipping like 'flu' from influenza; its use peaked in June 2023, when Tom Holland joked that he had 'limited rizz'.

Which streamer is credited with popularising "rizz" in 2021?

Kai Cenat, a Twitch streamer from New York, had been using rizz with his friends before he took it to his streams in 2021; TikTok then carried it everywhere.

The Gen Alpha word 'skibidi' was popularised by a YouTube animated series about a war involving what?

Singing toilets with human heads fight camera-headed humanoids in Alexey Gerasimov's Skibidi Toilet; the YouTube shorts grew so popular that Michael Bay signed on in 2024 to develop a film franchise.

What was Oxford's Word of the Year for 2024?

Brain rot won for 2024 after its use rose 230 per cent in a year, yet the phrase is first recorded in Thoreau's Walden of 1854; Collins chose 'brat' and Merriam-Webster 'polarization'.

Which term won Oxford's first public vote for Word of the Year, in 2022?

Goblin mode, meaning unapologetically lazy and self-indulgent behaviour, took 93 per cent of the ballots; it had gone viral that year through a faked headline about the actress Julia Fox.

What did the American Dialect Society name its Word of the Decade for the 2010s?

Singular 'they' won the American Dialect Society's vote in January 2020 for its growing use for people whose gender identity is nonbinary; 'google' had been its word of the 2000s.

What was the American Dialect Society's Word of the Year for 2023?

Enshittification is Cory Doctorow's word for how platforms first treat users well, then squeeze them for profit; Australia's Macquarie Dictionary crowned it too, a year after the American Dialect Society.

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year for 2020 was, unsurprisingly, what?

Pandemic was Merriam-Webster's pick for 2020; Australia's Macquarie Dictionary went with doomscrolling, and Oxford, for once, declined to name a single word for so strange a year.

First recorded in 1756, the word "slang" originally meant the special vocabulary of which people?

Tramps and thieves, or anyone of low character, spoke the first 'slang'; around 1800 the word widened to the jargon of any trade, and only later to casual speech in general.

Which catchphrase did Evans Carlson's wartime Marine Raiders adopt from the Chinese name for industrial cooperatives?

Gung ho was shorthand for China's industrial cooperatives; Carlson read it as 'work together' and made it his Raiders' motto, and Americans later bent it into a word for the overkeen.

The military acronym SNAFU dates from which conflict?

World War II American soldiers coined SNAFU, 'situation normal: all fouled up'; the Army then starred a bungling Private Snafu in its training cartoons, some of them written by Dr. Seuss.

In which country do people type "555" online to laugh?

Thailand: the Thai word for five sounds like 'ha', so 555 reads as 'hahaha'; Spanish speakers get the same laugh from 'jajaja', and the French type 'mdr', short for 'dead from laughing'.

'Hella', the intensifier meaning 'very', is a hallmark of slang from which US region?

The San Francisco Bay Area, possibly Oakland in the 1970s, is where hella took hold; West Coast hip-hop had carried it further by the late 1990s, but it still marks a Northern Californian.

Which bandleader published a 'Hepster's Dictionary' of Harlem jive talk in 1938?

Cab Calloway's Cat-ologue was the first dictionary by an African-American and became the New York Public Library's official jive reference.

Which French slang is formed by flipping the order of a word's syllables?

Verlan flips syllables: its own name inverts l'envers, 'back to front', the same way femme becomes meuf and fou becomes ouf.

The hacker slang "leet", often written 1337, is a shortening of which word?

Elite was the status that unlocked hidden files and chat rooms on 1980s bulletin boards; the Texas hacker group Cult of the Dead Cow is credited with clipping it to 'leet'.

Euphemisms such as 'unalive' and 'seggs', used to dodge automated online moderation, are known as what?

Algospeak blends 'algorithm' and 'speak': users swap in coded words because they expect automated moderation to bury or remove posts that mention death or sex, much as hackers once used leet to slip past text filters.

The rhyming slang "on your tod", from the jockey Tod Sloan, means what?

Alone: 'on your tod' is short for 'on your Tod Sloan', rhyming with 'on your own'. Sloan, an American riding in 1890s England, was mocked for his 'monkey crouch' before most jockeys copied it.

The Australian word 'pommy' for an English person is thought to come from which fruit?

Pommy is thought to come from 'pomegranate', a play on 'immigrant' (via 'jimmygrant') recorded in Australia from about 1912.

The slang "stan", meaning an obsessive fan, comes from a 2000 song by which rapper?

Eminem's 'Stan' is told through a fan's increasingly desperate letters to his idol; the character's name became a noun and a verb for obsessive fandom, and the Oxford English Dictionary has since added it.

Which IBM supercomputer had Urban Dictionary wiped from its memory after it began swearing?

Watson, IBM's Jeopardy!-playing machine, began answering researchers' questions with profanity once the slang site was loaded in. Programmers deleted it and added a filter to stop the swearing.

In a 1994 episode of Friends, which character calls Ross Geller 'mayor of the friend zone'?

Joey coins the phrase in 'The One with the Blackout', warning a lovesick Ross that he has waited too long to ask Rachel out. The sitcom is credited with popularising the term.

The first documented use of 'nerd' is as a zoo creature in a 1950 book by which children's author?

Dr. Seuss listed 'a Nerkle, a Nerd, and a Seersucker too' as animals for the collection in If I Ran the Zoo. A year later Newsweek reported the word being used in Detroit to mean a drip or a square.

Calling an obsessive fan a 'stan' comes from the title of a 2000 hit single by which rapper?

Eminem's 'Stan' tells the story of a delusional admirer whose letters to his idol go unanswered. A year later Nas hurled the name as an insult on his diss track 'Ether'.

Which word for making a person doubt their own sanity comes from a 1944 Ingrid Bergman thriller?

Gaslighting borrows the title of Gaslight, in which a husband slowly convinces his wife she is going insane while the lamps dim. Merriam-Webster named it Word of the Year for 2022.

American slang calls the police 'five-o' after a 1968 TV cop drama set in which state?

Hawaii is the fiftieth state, which gave the series Hawaii Five-O its title. Lookouts took to shouting 'five-o' as a warning that officers were on the way.

Junk email is called 'spam' after a 1970 sketch about canned meat by which British comedy troupe?

Monty Python set the sketch in a cafe where almost every dish contains Spam, and a table of Vikings drowns out the customers by singing the word over and over.

The slang word 'sus' was popularised during 2020 by which online multiplayer video game?

Among Us asks players to vote out the crewmate they suspect of being the impostor, so 'sus' filled every chat. Merriam-Webster added the word to its dictionary in September 2022.

The surf cry 'cowabunga' began as a chief's greeting on which 1950s children's TV show?

Howdy Doody writer Edward Kean invented 'Kowabonga!' as a greeting for the character Chief Thunderthud. California surfers later made the word their own.

The dismissive send-off 'Bye, Felicia' comes from an Ice Cube line in which 1995 comedy film?

Friday has Ice Cube's character wave off a pestering neighbour whose name was actually spelled Felisha. The actress who played her believes he ad-libbed the line.

Which pair of numbers from a Skrilla rap song did Dictionary.com name its 2025 Word of the Year?

6-7 comes from the drill track 'Doot Doot (6 7)' and has no fixed meaning. It spread through video edits of basketball player LaMelo Ball, who is listed at 6 ft 7 in tall.

'Delulu', short for delusional, was first used on fan forums devoted to which genre of music?

K-pop forums such as OneHallyu used it around 2013 to mock fans who truly expected to meet their idols. TikTok later turned it into the motto 'delulu is the solulu'.

The dating term 'the ick' was popularised by a 2017 contestant on which British reality TV show?

Love Island contestant Olivia Attwood said that once you catch the ick it has 'taken over your body'. The first documented use of the phrase was in a 1998 episode of Ally McBeal.

MP Chlöe Swarbrick silenced a heckler with 'OK boomer' in 2019 while speaking in which country's parliament?

New Zealand's Swarbrick was backing a climate change bill when fellow MP Todd Muller interrupted her. Muller was a Gen Xer, not a boomer at all.

The internet insult 'simp' began in the early 20th century as a shortening of which word?

Simpleton was clipped to 'simp' more than a century ago: in 1923 The New York Times printed a letter mocking 'bachelor simps' too tight to share their earnings with a wife.

The acronym GOAT is traced to which boxer, whose wife incorporated 'G.O.A.T. Inc.' in 1992?

Muhammad Ali proclaimed himself 'the greatest' throughout his career, and his wife Lonnie set up the company to manage his name. LL Cool J's 2000 album G.O.A.T. spread the acronym.

The 'aura farming' dance craze began with an 11-year-old dancing on the bow of a racing boat in which country?

Indonesia's Pacu Jalur races in Riau put a child at the front of each boat to dance when the team is leading. Rayyan Arkan Dikha's rhythmic routine went viral.

In Gen Alpha slang, a 'Fanum tax', named after a Bronx-born streamer, is a share of a friend's what?

Food is the levy: Fanum took cookies from a fellow streamer during a livestream and called it a tax, and the name stuck for any pinched bite of a friend's meal.

In slang that Gen Z borrowed from African-American English, what is a 'cap', as in 'no cap'?

A lie is a cap, so tacking 'no cap' onto the end of a statement vouches that the speaker is being truthful and genuine.

Which word did Dictionary.com name Word of the Year for 2024 after Jools Lebron's viral TikTok videos?

Demure took off in August 2024, when Lebron's clips about how to behave at the workplace drew several million views and brands rushed to borrow the phrase.

Thanks to an internet meme, which Midwestern state's name became slang for anything strange or surreal?

Ohio is the butt of 'Only in Ohio' memes, which jokingly pin bizarre and surreal scenes on the state, much as 'Florida man' headlines mock another.

Which word for a tech obsessive once described carnival performers who bit the head off a live chicken?

Geek was early-1900s American carnival slang for a fool or freak, and the gruesome sideshow 'geek show' kept the name alive until the computer age gave it a new meaning.

Which word for someone who lures people with a fake online identity comes from the title of a 2010 documentary?

Catfish follows Nev Schulman as he learns the young woman he fell for online was invented by a Michigan housewife. Her husband supplies the title with a tale about catfish shipped alongside live cod.

In the 2014 Vine that launched 'on fleek', teenager Kayla Newman was praising which of her features?

Eyebrows were what she was showing off: posting as Peaches Monroee from near Chicago, Newman had just had hers done for the first time.

Which everyday word for a man comes from effigies of a Gunpowder Plot conspirator burned on English bonfires?

Guy first meant the ragged effigy of Guy Fawkes, then in the 19th century any oddly turned-out person, before it lost its sting and came to mean any man.

The cannabis code '420' began with California students who met at 4:20 pm by a statue of which French scientist?

Louis Pasteur's statue stood on their campus in San Rafael, where five friends who called themselves the Waldos used '4:20 Louis' as their code for the plan in 1971.

The Oxford English Dictionary credits which hip-hop group's 1994 song with popularising 'mullet' for the haircut?

Beastie Boys hurled 'mullet' and 'mullet head' as insults in the track 'Mullet Head', describing a cut clipped at the sides and left untouched at the back.

'Mewing', the jawline craze spread by influencers, is named after a British father and son of which profession?

Orthodontists Mike Mew and his father lent the technique their surname; the elder Mew summed it up as 'stand up straight and shut your mouth', and the profession does not support his theories.

Which 1990 documentary about New York's drag ball scene taught outsiders the slang 'shade', 'reading' and 'legendary'?

Paris Is Burning lets ball figures such as Pepper LaBeija, Dorian Corey and Willi Ninja explain their own lingo, including the 'houses' that served as surrogate families.

Which rapper, whose alter ego is 'the BasedGod', is credited with coining 'based' as slang for bold positivity?

Lil B defined it as being yourself and 'not being scared of what people think about you'; the word later spread online as an all-purpose stamp of approval.

American slang calls which coin 'two bits', a relic of the Spanish 'pieces of eight' once spent in the colonies?

Quarter dollars are two bits because one bit was an eighth of the Spanish dollar. The decimal US currency had no 12½-cent coin, but the phrase outlived the change.

'The 411', American slang for the inside scoop, comes from the number Americans dialled for which telephone service?

Directory assistance is the official name, but Americans simply called the service 'information', which is how '411' came to mean the facts on anything.

In American diner lingo, 'Adam and Eve on a raft' is a short-order cook's call for two poached eggs on what?

Toast is the raft and the eggs are Adam and Eve. In the same counter code, 'wreck 'em' means scramble them, and 'Eve with a lid' is apple pie, after the forbidden fruit.

Which word won a banker's $200 contest to brand people who drank illegally during American Prohibition?

Scofflaw beat more than 25,000 entries in the contest run by Delcevare King, a keen supporter of the ban; two entrants sent in the same word and split the prize of gold.

Which word for a boss did American servicemen bring home from Japan, where it meant 'squad leader'?

Honcho comes from 'hancho', joining 'han' (squad) and 'cho' (chief); servicemen stationed in Japan and Korea between 1947 and 1953 carried it home as slang for the officer in charge.

Comedian Harris Wittels, who coined 'humblebrag' in 2010, was a writer and executive producer on which sitcom?

Parks and Recreation also cast Wittels as a dim-witted animal control worker. He turned the word into a book, and the American Dialect Society voted it the 'most useful' word of 2011.

A 1992 hoax fed a newspaper invented slang such as 'lamestain' and 'wack slacks' for which music scene?

Grunge had no slang of its own, so label worker Megan Jasper made terms up on the spot for a reporter, including 'swingin' on the flippity-flop' for hanging out. They ran as fact in a full-page story.

'Bromance' is credited to Dave Carnie, who coined it in the 1990s as editor of a magazine about which sport?

Skateboarding magazine Big Brother used the word for the close bonds that grow between skaters who spend a great deal of time together.

'Mansplaining' was inspired by the 2008 essay 'Men Explain Things to Me', written by which American author?

Rebecca Solnit described a man at a party lecturing her about an important new book without realising she had written it. She never used the word in the essay herself.

Which Charli XCX album title did Collins English Dictionary name its Word of the Year for 2024?

Brat set off the 'Brat Summer' craze, and its cover art and look were even adopted by Kamala Harris's 2024 presidential campaign.

'Limey', American slang for a Briton, recalls the citrus juice the Royal Navy gave sailors to prevent which disease?

Scurvy was kept at bay by the lemon or lime juice added to each sailor's daily ration of watered-down rum. 'Lime-juicer', first a jibe at navy men, was later clipped to 'limey'.

The cowboy word 'buckaroo' is generally believed to be an English mangling of which Spanish word for a cattle herder?

Vaquero comes from 'vaca', Spanish for cow. 'Buckaroo' first appeared in American English in 1827 and became the name for the cowboys of the Great Basin.

'Hooch' comes from the Hoochinoo, a people of which US state whose liquor was a favourite of gold rush miners?

Alaska's Hoochinoo take their name from a Tlingit phrase said to mean 'grizzly bear fort'; the clipped form 'hooch' was in print by 1897.

Destiny's Child made 'bootylicious' famous in 2001, but which rapper had already used the word on a 1992 Dr. Dre track?

Snoop Dogg dropped it into 'Dre Day' nine years before the hit single, whose popularity put the word into the Oxford English Dictionary in 2004.

The word 'meme' was coined in 1976 by which British evolutionary biologist, long before the internet adopted it?

Richard Dawkins introduced the term in The Selfish Gene for an idea that spreads from mind to mind; his own examples included melodies, catchphrases and fashion.

Before Urban Dictionary, founder Aaron Peckham built a spoof of which search engine, closing it after a legal letter?

Ask Jeeves got the parody treatment while Peckham was studying computer science at Cal Poly; in 1999 he launched his slang site as a send-up of 'stuffy' dictionaries.

Cartoonist Billy DeBeck is credited with introducing 'heebie-jeebies' and 'horsefeathers' in which comic strip?

Barney Google made a merchandising hit of Spark Plug, its title character's race horse; DeBeck is also credited with popularising 'hotsy totsy' and 'bodacious'.

Which C. W. McCall hit about truckers 'Rubber Duck' and 'Pig Pen' rode America's CB radio craze to number one?

Convoy is packed with truckers' CB slang: the lead truck is the 'front door', Los Angeles is 'Shakytown', and to 'put the hammer down' is to floor the accelerator.

'Clanker', a put-down for robots and AI software, was popularised as a soldiers' insult in which sci-fi franchise?

Star Wars: Republic Commando, a 2005 video game, introduced it to the franchise as a slur for battle droids. In 2025 a US senator promised a bill so callers 'don't have to talk to a clanker'.

A 2013 White House post showing the Obamas' dog read 'stop trying to make fetch happen', quoting which teen comedy?

Mean Girls supplied the line, and the pun landed because Bo, the dog, was pictured holding a tennis ball. Entertainment Weekly conceded that 'fetch' may never happen.