Slang time machine
Every English slang term has a moment it first showed up in print or on someone's lips. We've tagged 4,786 terms with a first attested decade — from 18th-century thieves’ cant through to 2020s internet vocabulary. Pick a decade below.
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1840s — 35 terms
Showing top 35 by views40
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mate
1841🔊
cooked
1848tiktok
🔊bender
1846bluesky
🔊absinthe
1840🔊
bodega
1840bluesky
🔊kangaroo court
1848bluesky
🔊antirent
1840🔊
Sharon
1847bluesky
🔊nigger
1840bluesky
🔊utu
1840🔊
nutria
1841🔊
shirty
1846🔊
conflab
1840🔊
artistic
1849bluesky
🔊antirentism
1840🔊
coon
1848bluesky
🔊japonicadom
1849🔊
mercall
1846🔊
layoff
1841bluesky
🔊ozone
1840bluesky
🔊ingross
1849🔊
Michigander
1848🔊
excelsior
1841bluesky
🔊racy of the soil
1842🔊
fiver
1843bluesky
🔊ruru
1842🔊
roorbach
1844🔊
coon's age
1843🔊
Box and Cox
1847🔊
jim-dandy
1840🔊
doughboy
1847🔊
bloviate
1845🔊
Aunt Sally
1843🔊
Railroad City
1849🔊
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.