49 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 used 'Old Kinderhook', after his New York birthplace, and its 'OK Clubs' spread the abbreviation nationwide.

When "dude" first appeared in print in 1883, what did it mean?

In 1883 a dude was a fussily dressed man, a dandy aping English fashion; the Western sense of a city slicker, as in 'dude ranch', came later.

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

Lester Young, the Count Basie tenor saxophonist, is credited with spreading 'cool' as approval among 1940s jazz musicians, where the slang sense took hold.

"Bling bling" entered mainstream English after a 1999 single by which New Orleans rapper?

B.G.'s 1999 Cash Money single 'Bling Bling' carried the word into everyday English; the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary listed it by 2002.

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 expressions of approval from which decade's slang?

The 1920s flappers who said them also called an engagement ring a 'handcuff' and said 'I have to see a man about a dog' when buying whiskey.

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

Groovy began in 1930s jazz, from playing 'in the groove' of a record, before the 1960s counterculture adopted it as general approval.

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

His daughter Moon Unit supplied the Valspeak, whose uptalk and 'like' as a filler are now studied by linguists; Clueless cemented the stereotype in 1995.

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

The rhyme is usually dropped in practice, so a Cockney climbs "the apples" (apples and pears, stairs).

"Use your ___" means use your head; the blank comes from rhyming slang for what?

Loaf of bread rhymes with head; the phrase escaped the East End and is now used by people who have never heard of rhyming slang.

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

A Ruby Murray is a curry, rhyming slang after the Northern Irish singer who had five songs in the UK top twenty in one week in 1955.

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

Bow Bells are those of St Mary-le-Bow on Cheapside; the word Cockney itself comes from Middle English cokenay, a 'cock's egg', once an insult for soft city folk.

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

Round the Horne's characters Julian and Sandy, played by Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams, popularised 'bona' and 'zhoosh'; Polari faded after partial decriminalisation in 1967.

Which everyday British word for something dull or tacky is thought to come from Polari?

Naff, meaning dull or tacky, is thought to come from Polari; 'camp' is another Polari escapee, while 'vada' (look) and 'eek' (face) stayed underground.

What is an 'esky' in Australian slang?

An esky is a portable cooler, named after the Esky brand launched by Malley's of Sydney in 1952 and now used for any cool box.

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

"Sheila" for a woman, by contrast, comes from the Irish name Síle.

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.

The internet acronym LOL was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in which year?

The OED added LOL in March 2011, in the same update as OMG and FYI, noting that LOL had earlier meant 'little old lady'.

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

Admiral John Fisher wrote it to Churchill, decades before anyone owned a modem.

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

Drake's 2011 single 'The Motto', featuring Lil Wayne, carried the hook 'you only live once, that's the motto, YOLO' and sent the acronym worldwide.

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

Patrick McGinnis coined FOMO in a 2004 piece for The Harbus, Harvard Business School's student paper, alongside FOBO, fear of better options.

The -ie ending of "selfie", first used in a 2002 forum, is typical of which country's English?

The -ie ending is classic Australian; Oxford made it Word of the Year in 2013.

Oxford's 2015 Word of the Year was not a word at all. What was it?

The word emoji itself is Japanese for picture-character and has nothing to do with "emotion".

The Japanese word "emoji" literally combines "e" and "moji", meaning what?

Emoji combines e, 'picture', and moji, 'character'; Shigetaka Kurita drew the first set of 176 in 1999 for NTT DoCoMo's i-mode service.

Which Carnegie Mellon computer scientist proposed the sideways smiley :-) on a bulletin board in September 1982?

Scott Fahlman proposed :-( at the same time, to mark the posts that were not jokes.

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

Rizz is a shortening of charisma, its middle syllable; Oxford chose it for 2023 after Tom Holland joked he had 'limited rizz'.

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

Kai Cenat, the Twitch streamer, is credited with spreading rizz from his 2021 streams; he later complained that TikTok had twisted its meaning.

"Cheugy", the Gen Z put-down for millennial taste, was coined in 2013 by a teenager in which city?

Gaby Rasson's Beverly Hills High School coinage sat unused until a 2021 TikTok and a New York Times piece; Live Laugh Love signs are the classic example.

The Gen Alpha word 'skibidi' comes from a YouTube animated series about warfare involving what?

Singing toilets with human heads battle camera-headed humans in Alexey Gerasimov's Skibidi Toilet, which hit 65 billion views in its first year and got a Michael Bay film deal.

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

Oxford chose 'brain rot' for 2024, noting its use had risen 230 per cent; Collins picked 'brat' and Merriam-Webster 'polarization' the same year.

Which word did Oxford choose for 2022, describing a period of shameless self-indulgent slobbing?

Goblin mode won Oxford's first public vote for Word of the Year with 93 per cent of ballots; Collins went with permacrisis and Merriam-Webster with gaslighting.

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

The American Dialect Society chose singular 'they' as Word of the Decade in January 2020; 'google' took the 2000s and 'web' the 1990s.

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

Enshittification, Cory Doctorow's term for platforms decaying once they have trapped their users, was the ADS choice for 2023; Merriam-Webster chose 'authentic' that year.

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

Merriam-Webster chose 'pandemic' for 2020 after look-ups spiked in March; Macquarie went with doomscrolling and Oxford declined to pick a single word.

The word "slang" itself is first recorded in 1756. What did it originally describe?

Its origin is unknown; one theory ties it to "sling", language that is thrown.

The Marine slogan "gung ho" was borrowed from a Chinese term for what?

Gōnghé was shorthand for the Chinese Industrial Cooperatives; Evans Carlson's Marine Raiders adopted it as 'work together' in 1942, and Americans bent it to mean overkeen.

The military acronym SNAFU dates from which conflict?

SNAFU, 'situation normal: all fouled up', was US Army slang from about 1941, early in World War II; its cousin FUBAR dates from the same war.

The Thai equivalent of typing "hahaha" online is what?

Thais type 555 because the number five is pronounced 'ha', so 555 reads 'hahaha'; Spanish speakers type jajaja and the French mdr.

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

Hella emerged in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1970s and spread with Bay Area hip-hop; No Doubt's 2002 single 'Hella Good' took it national.

Which jazz 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'), and femme becomes meuf, a form now common in French speech.

Which hacker collective is credited with coining the term 'leet', as in 1337?

The Cult of the Dead Cow, a Texas hacker group founded in 1984, is credited with coining 'leet' from 'elite', the status that unlocked special folders on bulletin boards.

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

Algospeak blends 'algorithm' and 'speak', serving the same filter-evading purpose leet once did.

The rhyming slang 'on one's Tod', meaning alone, commemorates a famous what?

Tod Sloan, an American jockey who rode in England in the 1890s, rhymes with 'alone' (or 'own'), giving 'on one's Tod'.

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.

Whose 1859 Dictionary of Modern Slang held the first known glossary of rhyming slang?

John Camden Hotten's 1859 dictionary carried the first rhyming-slang glossary; he dated the form to the 1840s and London's street 'chaunters' and 'patterers'.