World’s Largest Online Slang Dictionary
- 3 hours ago
- 2 min read
After years of work, Jonathon Green's eponymous Dictionary of Slang spans centuries of the 'vulgar tongue' and is now available for free online.
In 1993, Green started compiling his research into English slang by sifting through mountains of primary sources. The culmination was Green’s Dictionary of Slang, a three-volume reference set containing 10.3 million words over 53,000 separate entries. It was first published in 2010, but the printed reference tomes are now not just out-of-date but also out-of-print.
So, Green - the world's top lexicographer of slang - has transferred his entire project online for anyone to use and enjoy. Green’s Dictionary of Slang is now available for free on its own, regularly updated website. Not only that, but it includes more than 60,000 additional quotations along with 2,500 new entries and sub-entries. The site also contains search tools as well as a predictably gigantic source bibliography.
“Language does not reach an end, nor does research,” Green wrote in his original introduction to the website in 2016. “GDoS Online is therefore a project in continual development. As well as the natural expansion of the material on offer, it is our intention to add to the way the information is displayed, both as to quality and quantity.”
Apart from this magnum opus, Green has published non-slang titles in the form of three dictionaries of occupational jargon, a narrative history of the Sixties, a book on cannabis, and an encyclopedia of censorship.
The word 'slang' originated around the mid-18th century, initially referring to the specialised, "low" vocabulary of thieves, tramps, and street vendors. While its exact origin is debated, it likely derives from Nordic/Scandinavian roots related to "slinging" (e.g., slengjeord or slengja kjeften), meaning to use abusive language or "sling the jaw". It is not a shortened form of "language," a common misconception; but another theory links it to the 18th-century "slang" meaning a narrow strip of land, where traveling merchants ("hawkers") would operate, leading to "on the slang" being associated with their specialised, informal speech.
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