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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1870s — 29 terms
Showing top 29 by views70
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phonograph
1877bluesky
🔊cowboy
1870bluesky
🔊platypusary
1873🔊
two solitudes
1875🔊
Jap
1872🔊
Oscar Asche
1871🔊
telephone
1876bluesky
🔊MOD
1872🔊
Queens
1870bluesky
🔊eat crow
1870🔊
rollover
1875bluesky
🔊Robertson screwdriver
1879🔊
malarkey
1877bluesky
🔊lollygag
1871🔊
DO
1874🔊
rain check
1877🔊
dinkum
1879🔊
all-rounder
1875🔊
Jimmy Britts
1879🔊
donkey's years
1876🔊
German sparrow
1870🔊
muslin
1875🔊
blessed assurance
1873🔊
criminal tribe
1871🔊
Johnson hole
1878🔊
bunco-steerer
1870🔊
boiled shirt
1873🔊
hitch one's wagon to a star
1870🔊
one-horse town
1871🔊
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.