Slang by era and region
Slang dates a character faster than anything else they say. These lists sort it by when Wiktionary first records it and by the country that uses it.
By era
An era list holds only words with a date precise enough to place them. A word dated just to “the 20th century” could belong to 1905 or 1995, so it is left out rather than guessed.
- Slang from before 1900 (83 words)
- Slang from 1900 to 1945 (42 words)
- Slang from 1946 to 1999 (46 words)
- Slang from 2000 and later (37 words)
- Slang that now sounds dated (200 words)
By region
Regional lists keep slang still in use; the dated words have their own list above. A word used in two countries appears in both.
- American slang (200 words)
- British slang (200 words)
- Australian slang (200 words)
- Irish slang (155 words)
- Canadian slang (98 words)
- Scottish slang (33 words)
- New Zealand slang (112 words)
- South African slang (35 words)
What these lists leave out
Slurs and sexual slang are not listed, even where the source records them. That is deliberate. Neither is anything without a source: Wiktionary dates a word only when an editor has found it in print, which is why the recent decades hold fewer words than people actually used.
Sources and licenses
-
Meanings, labels, and dates from
English Wiktionary, by way of the
kaikki.org extraction, under
CC BY-SA 4.0. The lists
derived from it are shared under the same license: read the
data notice, or copy them from
src/tools/thesaurus/generated/in the Tabularia repository. - Words are ordered by how often they appear in modern English, measured with wordfreq.