Slang definitions and example sentences on Wordnik

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Definitions (28)

American Heritage Dictionary (5)

noun A kind of language occurring chiefly in casual and playful speech, made up typically of short-lived coinages and figures of speech that are deliberately used in place of standard terms for added raciness, humor, irreverence, or other effect.
noun Language peculiar to a group; argot or jargon: thieves' slang.
intransitive verb To use slang.

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Century Dictionary (13)

An obsolete or archaic preterit of sling.
A narrow piece of land. Also slanket. Halliwell. There runneth forth into the sea a certain shelfe or slang, like unto an out-thrust tongue, such as Englishmen in old time termed a File. Holland, tr. of Camden, p. 715. (Davies.) Eventually, though very beat, he struggled across a couple of grass fields into the slang adjoining Brown's Wood. The Field, April 4, 1885. (Encyc. Dict.)
The cant words or jargon used by thieves, peddlers, beggars, and the vagabond classes generally; cant. Slang in the sense of the cant language of thieves appears in print certainly as early as the middle of the last century. It was included by Grose in his “Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue,” published in 1785. But it was many years before it was allowed a place in any vocabulary of our speech that confined itself to the language of good speakers and writers, Its absence from such works would not necessarily imply that it had not been in frequent use. Still, that this never had been the case we have direct evidence. Scott, in his novel of “Redgauntlet,” which appeared in 1824, when using the word, felt the necessity of defining it; and his definition shows not only that it was generally unknown, but that it had not then begun to depart at all from its original sense. In the thirteenth chapter of that work, one of the characters is represented as trying to overhear a conversation, … but … “what did actually reach his ears was disguised so completely by the use of cant words and the thieves' Latin called slang that, even when he caught the words, he found himself as far as ever from the sense of their conversation.” No one who is now accustomed either to speak slang [in def. 2], or to speak of the users of it, would think of connecting it with anything peculiar to the language of thieves. Yet it is clear from this one quotation that the complete change of meaning which the term has undergone has taken place within a good deal less than sixty years. The Nation, Oct. 9, 1890, p. 289. Let proper nurses be assigned, to take care of these babes of grace [young thieves]. … The master who teaches them should be a man well versed in the cant language commonly called the slang patter, in which they should by all means excel. Jonathan Wild's Advice to his Successor (1758). (Hotten.)

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Examples (32)

Copacetic, Consul Sommon would probably have said in American slang. — process 10
In China, when you get to the airport everyone be talking in American slang. — Chinalyst - China blogs in English
Probably due to this working process, the "lathe-slitting machine" is usually referred to as "a baloney slicer," in American slang, similar to watching cold-cuts sliced at the grocery.
When Ohad Naharin, the artistic director of Israel's Batsheva Dance Company, developed a technique for training dancers and named it Gaga, I'm pretty sure he wasn't taking into account the word's meaning in English slang. — Village Voice - The most recent 10 stories
In Australian slang, "to root" means what "to screw" means in American slang. — Libertarian Blog Place

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dialect · idiom · profanity · jargon · vernacular · lingo · phraseology · allusion · metaphor · vocabulary · parlance · terminology

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slang: Slang

Etymologies (5)

American Heritage Dictionary (1)

Origin unknown.

Century Dictionary (4)

Origin obscure; perhaps, like slanket, connected with slank, slim, and ult. with sling.
Of obscure cant origin; the form suggests a connection with sling, in a way indicated by the use of sling and fling in ‘to sling epithets,’ ‘to fling reproaches,’ etc., and by similar uses of related Scandinavian forms, as Norwegian sleng, a slinging, a device, a burden of a song; slengja, sling (slengja kjeften, abuse, literally ‘sling the jaw’); slengjenamn, a nickname; slengje-ord, an insulting word or allusion; Icelandic slyngr, slyngum, cunning: see sling. The noun, in this view, must have arisen in quasi-composition (slang-patter, slang-word, slang-name, etc.), or else from the verb. Evidence of early use is lacking. The word has nothing to do with language or lingo, and there is no evidence to establish a Gipsy origin.
from slang, n.
Origin obscure and various; cf. slang, slang.

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