British slang

British slang is its own ecosystem. London produces vocabulary the rest of the country adopts (or mocks); Manchester, Glasgow, and Belfast each export their own. A lot of what reads as 'British' globally is actually MLE — Multicultural London English — a dialect that emerged in the 1980s from Caribbean, South Asian, and West African influences and now carries most of UK youth slang.

This hub collects the British-tagged terms in our dictionary. Not all are exclusively British — many cross the Atlantic in both directions — but they originated, peaked, or are still primarily used in the UK.