Green’s Dictionary of Slang Online

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

Martha, you remember Jonathan Green?

Sure, the slang guy, right?

Right. British slang lexicographer Jonathan Green.

He’s the guy who compiled this awesome three-volume dictionary called Green’s Dictionary of Slang.

Use it all the time, yeah.

Fantastic work.

Well, what he’s done with this work and the database that it’s based on, he’s exported some data for some very specific categories.

And these have to do with words for being drunk, for the act of drinking, for the place that you drink, for the person who pours the drink, all of these different terms.

And he’s exported them and he’s put them on a timeline, separate timelines.

So you can actually see them in context through history.

And it’s kind of an interesting way to examine these words and kind of start to understand the periods in which, for some reason, English just turned up all these extra bits of slang.

It’s a great perspective on English that you don’t usually get from a dictionary or thesaurus.

It’s a nice add-on.

So if I were writing a novel set in the 18th century, for example, I could go find fun words, unusual words that people were using?

That’s right.

It’s a good starting point for that.

If you were doing that, I would probably recommend you use the Oxford Historical Thesaurus to give you even more context, but it’s definitely a place to start.

He’s also working on, and this is something we can’t talk about too much on the air, but you can look on his website.

He’s also going to talk about parts of the body, particular parts of the body, and the acts that we do with them.

So the intercourse and that sort of thing.

Yeah, and so because he comes from a place of science.

It’s not just about giggling at these naughty words.

It’s about figuring out why we have these words, sometimes more euphemistic, sometimes literal, at these different parts in English language history.

So if I were having a great time in a pub several hundred years ago, I might use some other words.

There’s a ton of these.

I like the ones in particular for the person who pours the drink or the person who owns the bar or pub where you are served.

Right.

We’d say bartender today.

But you might have said knight of the spigot or squire of the gimlet or rum dropper or jump or lamber down, right?

Rum dropper.

And then what they would pour into the glass would be maybe snake bite or pigsy or old tiger or cougar juice or howling modok.

Good stuff, right?

Give me some cougar juice.

But there’s a flavor there.

There’s a sense that somebody had a good laugh and it stuck because it was a funny word or it had some flair to it, some special sparkle.

Yeah, that’s glorious.

So we can find this online.

Sure, at jonathangreen.co.uk.

Be warned that Jonathan spells his first name Owen instead of Ann.

So jonathangreen.co.uk.

Okie doke.

I can’t wait to check it out.

And if you want to talk about any aspect of language, you want to share a story about words, call us 877-929-9673 or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.