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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1860s — 38 terms
Showing top 38 by views60
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Lincoln
1865bluesky
🔊chuck wagon
1860🔊
Copperheadism
1860🔊
Met
1863🔊
skat
1864🔊
chiseler
1860🔊
scad
1869🔊
walkabout
1861bluesky
🔊rep by pop
1867🔊
AB
1860🔊
scrimshaw
1865🔊
bicycle
1868bluesky
🔊picky
1860bluesky
🔊Saxon
1860bluesky
🔊carburetor
1862bluesky
🔊slaw
1861bluesky
🔊Reb
1862🔊
on the up-and-up
1863🔊
humbug
1864bluesky
🔊gasoline
1862bluesky
🔊hellhole
1866bluesky
🔊farb
1863🔊
red cent
1864bluesky
🔊moke
1860🔊
Quaker gun
1862🔊
Sainsbo's
1869🔊
honyock
1860🔊
akether
1867🔊
Peter Witt
1869🔊
Gandhigiri
1869🔊
tenderfoot
1866🔊
Down syndrome
1860🔊
Dad and Dave
1868🔊
rising of the moon
1865🔊
poteen
1869🔊
dumbocracy
1869🔊
Juneteenth
1865bluesky
🔊down the banks
1862🔊
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.