Etymology

SLANG

The Word That Names the Unnamed

First attested 1756•Origin unknown
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1720s–1780s

The Criminal Underground

In the shadowy world of Georgian London—a city of gin lanes, pickpockets, and public hangings—a new word was taking shape. It emerged not from academies or drawing rooms, but from the very margins of society: the thieves' dens, beggars' haunts, and itinerant performers who had their own secret tongue.

For centuries, this secret language had been called cant or pedlars' French—vocabulary deliberately obscured to exclude outsiders and protect criminal enterprises. Thomas Harman had documented it as early as 1566, and successive glossaries catalogued the canting crew's coded speech.

But by the mid-eighteenth century, a new term was circulating among those who knew this hidden language. That word was slang—itself a piece of insider vocabulary, destined to migrate from the darkness into the light of common usage.

Gin Lane by William Hogarth, 1751 - depicting the squalor and chaos of Georgian London's gin-drinking culture
Hogarth's London: the world where slang was born. William Hogarth, "Gin Lane," 1751. Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain.

First Attestation

"Thomas Throw had been upon the town, knew the slang well; had often sate a flasher at M——d——g——n's, and understood every word in the scoundrel's dictionary."

—William Toldervy, The History of Two Orphans, 1756

The year 1756 marks the earliest confirmed written use of slang as a noun. William Toldervy's novel describes a character who "knew the slang well"—meaning he understood the criminal vocabulary, the secret language of the London underworld.

But words live in speech long before they appear in print. Fifteen years earlier, in 1741, an account of the pickpocket Mary Young (alias Jenny Diver) at Tyburn execution used slang as a verb: "slanging the gentry mort rumly with a sham kinchin"—describing her elaborate deception scheme.

The word was already in circulation, already useful, already marking the boundary between those who belonged and those who did not.

1785–1860

Lexicographic Dawn

In 1785, Captain Francis Grose published the Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue—a work that was part scholarship, part subversion. Grose, whom Eric Partridge would later call "the greatest antiquary, joker, and porter-drinker of his day," deliberately parodied Samuel Johnson's august Dictionary by applying the same meticulous methods to disreputable vocabulary.

Grose's dictionary performed a paradox: by cataloguing slang, he began to domesticate it. The very act of documentation—ordering, defining, presenting in alphabetical dignity—drew marginal language toward the center.

By 1801, the OED attests slang extending beyond criminal jargon to mean any professional vocabulary. By 1818, it had expanded further to encompass informal, vivid language generally. The word was climbing the social ladder.

Portrait of Captain Francis Grose, antiquary and lexicographer
Francis Grose (1731–1791), antiquary and lexicographer of the vulgar tongue. Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain.
Title page of A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue by Francis Grose, 1785
Title page of Grose's Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, 1785. Internet Archive, Public Domain.

The Mystery of Origin

slang
/slaŋ/
Origin: unknown

Here is the paradox at the heart of this etymology: the word slang—which names vocabulary of marginal, obscure, uncertain origin—is itself of marginal, obscure, uncertain origin. After 250 years of scholarly attention, dictionaries still confess ignorance.

"The etymology of slang remains uncertain."

—Oxford English Dictionary

"Origin unknown."

—Merriam-Webster

The leading theory, proposed by Isaac Taylor in the 1860s, connects slang to Norwegian dialect words for narrow strips of land—sleng, meaning a slinging or throwing motion, and related terms suggesting something that "moves freely in any direction." The OED calls this "the prime but unproven suspect."

In 2016, etymologist Anatoly Liberman declared confidently that the origin "is known." The OED, reviewing the same evidence, politely disagreed. The mystery endures.

The word performs what it names: it arrived from the margins, its papers never quite in order, and it has never fully disclosed its origins.

1860–1911

Victorian Gatekeeping

As slang migrated from the criminal underworld into broader usage, a new question emerged: who gets to police the boundary between proper language and improper? The Victorian era answered with characteristic confidence.

"Slang is a conscious offence against some conventional standard of propriety. A mere vulgarism is not slang, except when it is purposely adopted... The slang word is a deliberate substitute for a word of the vernacular, just as the characters of a cipher are substitutes for the letters of the alphabet."

—Henry Bradley, Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th edition, 1911

Bradley's definition—"conscious offence against propriety"—reveals the class anxiety beneath Victorian linguistic gatekeeping. Slang was not merely informal speech; it was deliberate transgression. To use slang was to choose the cipher over the letter, the shadow over the light.

The British Museum Reading Room, where the Britannica was compiled, stood as a monument to proper knowledge—ordered, catalogued, authoritative. Slang represented everything that escaped such ordering.

Interior panorama of the British Museum Reading Room, showing the domed ceiling and circular arrangement of desks
The British Museum Reading Room: cathedral of proper language. Photo by David Iliff, Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA.
1919–1950s

American Expansion

If Victorian Britain viewed slang as conscious offense, American voices offered rehabilitation. No one championed the cause more vigorously than H.L. Mencken, the "Sage of Baltimore," whose 1919 treatise The American Language inverted British class anxieties.

Portrait photograph of H.L. Mencken by Carl Van Vechten, 1932
H.L. Mencken (1880–1956). Photograph by Carl Van Vechten, 1932. Library of Congress, Public Domain.

"Slang in its origin is nearly always respectable; it is devised not by the stupid populace, but by individuals of wit and ingenuity."

—H.L. Mencken, The American Language, 1919

Mencken's move was radical: slang was not the language of the ignorant masses but the invention of the clever. It demonstrated "wit and ingenuity," not vulgarity. American democracy, he implied, could create language as surely as British aristocracy could police it.

The Jazz Age provided the proving ground. New vocabulary flooded American speech: words for music, for dance, for the exuberance of a nation unbuttoning its linguistic collar. Slang was no longer transgression—it was invention.

1960s–1990s

Academic Legitimation

The emergence of sociolinguistics as a discipline in the 1960s brought new questions: not whether slang was proper, but what it did. How did informal vocabulary function in communities? What social work did it perform?

The answer was not simple. Some linguists, like William Labov, saw slang as peripheral to serious study—relegated, as one critic put it, to "an outer, extra-linguistic darkness." But others recognized something the Victorian gatekeepers had missed.

"[Slang is] a colloquial vocabulary that creates solidarity within a social group or affiliates speakers with a trend in society."

—Connie Eble, Slang and Sociability, 1996

Eble's research on college slang at UNC Chapel Hill reframed the question entirely. Slang was not offense against propriety or even creative wit—it was social glue. It marked who belonged, who was current, who understood the unwritten rules of a community.

The word slang had traveled from the underworld to the lecture hall. But could it survive its next migration—into the digital world?

1999–Present

Digital Present

In 1999, a website called Urban Dictionary appeared, promising definitions "written by you." The democratic impulse Mencken championed had found its ultimate expression: anyone could define slang, anyone could vote on meanings, anyone could contribute to the living vocabulary.

By the 2020s, TikTok had accelerated slang evolution to unprecedented speed. Words like rizz, bussin', and no cap traveled from niche usage to mainstream awareness in weeks rather than decades. The vocabulary that once took generations to escape the underworld now went viral overnight.

🔍Define...
slang
▲ 42,847▼ 1,203
Words that exist to confuse your parents and make you feel old.
"I don't understand any of this slang anymore"

Yet something curious persists. Even in an age of crowdsourced lexicography, slang still marks boundaries. The vocabulary of each generation, each subculture, each online community still serves Eble's function: creating solidarity, signaling membership, distinguishing insiders from outsiders.

The word slang began as underworld insider vocabulary—and remains, in its function if not its status, a marker of who belongs and who does not.

To trace the word slang is to trace the contested boundary between proper speech and everything that threatens it. From Toldervy's 1756 novel to today's crowdsourced definitions, the word has named the outside, the excluded, the improper—even as that boundary constantly shifts.

The word performs what it describes: uncertain origin, marginal beginnings, gradual legitimization. Like the vocabulary it names, slang arrived from somewhere we cannot quite pin down, carrying papers we cannot quite verify.

And like the language itself, it refuses to hold still.

Timeline

1566
Thomas Harman publishes first English cant glossary
Pre-slang: "cant" and "pedlars French" name criminal language
1698
B.E. Gentleman's "New Dictionary of the Canting Crew"
Expands underworld vocabulary documentation
1741
Earliest verb usage: "slanging the gentry mort"
Criminal deception scheme described at Tyburn execution
1756
First noun attestation in Toldervy's novel
"knew the slang well" — earliest confirmed written use
1785
Grose's "Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue"
First major slang dictionary; scholarly yet subversive
1801
OED attests "slang" for any professional jargon
Semantic expansion beyond criminal vocabulary
1818
"Slang" attested for informal language generally
Modern broad meaning emerges
1859
Hotten's "Slang Dictionary" published
First etymological treatment of slang words
1860s
Isaac Taylor proposes Scandinavian etymology
"Narrow strip of land" theory—still leading hypothesis
1911
Bradley's Britannica definition
"Conscious offence against propriety" — canonical Victorian view
1919
Mencken's "The American Language"
Rehabilitates slang as creative, respectable innovation
1937
Partridge's "Dictionary of Slang"
Standard 20th-century reference work
1960s
Sociolinguistics emerges as discipline
Academic study of informal language begins
1996
Eble's "Slang and Sociability"
Reframes slang as identity and solidarity marker
1999
Urban Dictionary founded
Crowdsourced lexicography democratizes definition
2016
Liberman claims etymology "is known"
Advocates Scandinavian origin; OED remains unconvinced
2020s
TikTok accelerates slang evolution
Digital virality creates and spreads new vocabulary

Sources

Primary Sources

Historical Dictionaries

Scholarly Works

Images

  • William Hogarth, "Gin Lane" (1751) — Metropolitan Museum of Art, Public Domain
  • Francis Grose portrait — Francesco Bartolozzi, Yale Center for British Art, Public Domain
  • H.L. Mencken photograph — Carl Van Vechten, Library of Congress, Public Domain
  • British Museum Reading Room — Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA

Note on Etymology: This essay presents the current scholarly consensus that the etymology of "slang" remains uncertain. The Scandinavian theory (Isaac Taylor, 1860s; Liberman, 2016) is the leading hypothesis but has not been definitively proven. Merriam-Webster states "origin unknown"; the OED calls the Scandinavian theory "the prime but unproven suspect."