Slang time machine

Every English slang term has a moment it first showed up in print or on someone's lips. We've tagged 1,000 terms with a first attested decade — from 18th-century thieves’ cant through to 2020s internet vocabulary. Pick a decade below.

1940s — 26 terms

Showing top 26 by views

📻 Silent generation · pre-1945 →

🇦🇺 Australian & NZ slang

🇦🇺 Australian & NZ slang

🇬🇧 British & Irish slang

🔊

girlie

1940

👗 Fashion & Lifestyle

🇬🇧 British & Irish slang

🇬🇧 British & Irish slang

🔊

A&E

1948

🇬🇧 British & Irish slang

🔊

Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells

1944

🇬🇧 British & Irish slang

party political broadcast

1947

🇬🇧 British & Irish slang

🇬🇧 British & Irish slang

🇬🇧 British & Irish slang

🎤 Black culture & AAVE

🇦🇺 Australian & NZ slang

🇬🇧 British & Irish slang

🇬🇧 British & Irish slang

🇬🇧 British & Irish slang

🇬🇧 British & Irish slang

🔊

sprog

1940

🇬🇧 British & Irish slang

🇬🇧 British & Irish slang

🇦🇺 Australian & NZ slang

🇬🇧 British & Irish slang

🔊

Big Bang

1949

🎤 Black culture & AAVE

🇦🇺 Australian & NZ slang

👗 Fashion & Lifestyle

Fibber McGee's closet

🇦🇺 Australian & NZ slang

like turkeys voting for Christmas

know shit from Shinola

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.