Centuries of Slang
Posted by: Rebecca Vnuk
Dictionary lovers (you know who you are) will welcome the new 3-volume Green’s Dictionary of Slang. “Green” is Jonathon Green, the expert who compiled Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang and Chambers Slang Dictionary, among others. The new dictionary, with over 53,000 entries, definitions of more than 100,000 words, and more than 400,000 citations, is based on historical principles, meaning that Green provides example quotations going back, whenever possible, to first recorded use. For example, he traces the first use of “have a cow” to 1966, “cowabunga” to 1954 (it seems to have originated in the Howdy Doody show), “holy cow!” to 1917, “cowpoke” to 1881, and ”cow” as in unattractive woman back to 1550.
Green’s was published by Chambers in the UK and is distributed by Oxford in the US. You can read more about it here.
