Slang

How to spell slang

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce slang

What does slang mean?

1. nounVery informal vocabulary used in casual speech, often specific to a group or quickly going out of fashion.

Slang in a sentence

• The report avoided slang so that overseas clients could follow it easily.

• Teenagers invent new slang faster than dictionaries can record it.

Where does slang come from?

Language of origin: Unknown

Slang first appears in English around the middle of the 1700s, originally as a low or cant term referring to the special vocabulary of beggars, thieves, and other disreputable groups. Its ultimate origin is genuinely uncertain, which is why dictionaries hedge their accounts of it. One popular suggestion links it to Scandinavian roots, comparing Norwegian dialect words such as slengjeord, meaning roughly a 'slinging word' or insult, and slengjenamn, a nickname, both built on a verb for 'to sling' or 'throw'; the idea is of words flung about casually. Over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the meaning broadened from criminal jargon to the informal, playful, and often short-lived vocabulary of ordinary speech that we recognise today. Because its history is murky, etymologists give it cautiously, but the modern spelling has stayed simple and stable throughout.

How the word is built

• slang (single root; origin uncertain, treated as an unanalysable English word)