Slang time machine
Every English slang term has a moment it first showed up in print or on someone's lips. We've tagged 3,074 terms with a first attested decade — from 18th-century thieves’ cant through to 2020s internet vocabulary. Pick a decade below.
1840s — 32 terms
Showing top 32 by views40
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mate
1841🔊
cooked
1848tiktok
🔊absinthe
1840🔊
bender
1846bluesky
🔊bodega
1840bluesky
🔊quilkin
1846🔊
kangaroo court
1848bluesky
🔊snoozle
1847🔊
antirent
1840🔊
utu
1840🔊
shirty
1846🔊
nutria
1841🔊
coon's age
1843🔊
antirentism
1840🔊
bloviate
1845🔊
ruru
1842🔊
conflab
1840🔊
ingross
1849🔊
Railroad City
1849🔊
ozone
1840bluesky
🔊jim-dandy
1840🔊
doughboy
1847🔊
racy of the soil
1842🔊
japonicadom
1849🔊
Michigander
1848🔊
excelsior
1841bluesky
🔊Aunt Sally
1843🔊
fiver
1843bluesky
🔊Box and Cox
1847🔊
mercall
1846🔊
roorbach
1844🔊
jism
1842🔊
More on how slang travels through time
The lifecycle of a slang word
Mint, scale, ironize, retire — how every viral term moves through the same five stages.
Where slang is born now
The platforms and subcultures that mint vocabulary in 2026 — and why TikTok shifted everything.
AAVE and internet slang
The single biggest source of new mainstream English vocabulary, and why most of the words you used today started here.
Attestation dates come from etymologies originally sourced from Wiktionary contributors (CC BY-SA 4.0) and editorial expansion authored on Slangora. They reflect the earliest documented use we found for each term, not necessarily the moment it was coined.