For much of the twentieth century, the continuing history of slang was documented by Eric Partridge, especially in his Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, the first edition of which appeared in 1937, the eighth in 1984 (edited by Paul Beale, after Partridge’s death in 1979). This 1984 Partridge is the large volume that many of us have on our shelves, and continue to use. Even with Beale’s intervention, however, it is clear that, as a result of the accumulation of material through multiple editions and supplements, ‘Partridge’ had become a real mess, and the book had largely lost touch with contemporary slang. It was in an attempt to remedy these perceived inadequacies that the two-volume New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, edited by T. Dalzell and T. Victor, was published in 2006. This is a very disappointing work. While the book attempts to remedy the inadequacy of Partridge’s treatment of post-World War II slang, it does this in part by removing most of the earlier slang, and thereby setting the new contemporary slang adrift from its history. There is good treatment of non-British slang (North American, Australian, New Zealand, and Caribbean) from external contributors, but the editorial treatment is uneven. Quotations from texts are sometimes used to illustrate the terms, but these are often skimpy, and it is impossible to discern what kind of light they are meant to cast on the entries. It looks like a dictionary based on historical principles, but it has lost touch with both those historical principles and the histories of individual words that are the core of any such dictionary.

And so along comes Green’s Dictionary of Slang, by Jonathon Green. Green has produced numerous dictionaries and books on language, and he brings to this latest work the weight of decades spent working with words. His knowledge of the history of lexicography and the processes of dictionary-making is evident in his Chasing the Sun: Dictionary-Makers and the Dictionaries They Made (1996). His knowledge of slang from the past is evident in Slang Down the Ages: The Historical Development of Slang (1993). His dictionaries of slang and non-standard English include: Newspeak: A Dictionary of Jargon (1983), The Dictionary of Contemporary Slang (1984), The Slang Thesaurus (1986), and Neologisms: A Dictionary of Contemporary Coinages (1991). All of this work on slang fed into the 1998 Cassell Dictionary of Slang and the 2008 Chambers Slang Dictionary. Green’s latest work trumps all of these. There are three large-paged volumes, with much material on each page. More importantly, it is truly a dictionary based on historical principles, and it is this aspect that has in part produced the length of the work, and that renders to it an extraordinary authority. The focus is on the slang terms that have been generated by the major centres of ‘Anglophone’ English in the past five hundred or so years: America, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, South Africa, and the Caribbean. The dictionary includes about 110,000 words and phrases.

Since this is a dictionary based on historical principles, it follows a structure that is familiar to users of the Oxford English Dictionary and the Australian National Dictionary: headword; part of speech; spelling and form variants; etymology; definition; illustrative quotations (pronunciations are not provided in Green’s dictionary, an acknowledgment of the difficulty of doing this for terms that often straddle a range of Englishes). A dictionary based on historical principles generally presents meanings according to their historical development, but more significant than that is the fact that the intellectual core of such a dictionary consists in its historical citations. The citations are passages from texts of many kinds, citations that illustrate how a word has been used over time, and that provide the empirical evidence for the definitions to which they are attached. Traditionally, historical dictionaries have relied on printed sources such as books, newspaper, and magazines. Green has been willing to cull evidence from material in other forms of media, especially from the Internet. Traditional lexicography remains reluctant to use such material, since the traditional lexicographer has always been able to say: ‘if you do not believe my evidence, go to a library and check it.’ We simply do not know how much of the evidence on the Internet will remain forever checkable; but given the nature of Green’s material, which now often appears in these non-traditional forms, it is understandable that he turns to them.

The amount of citation evidence in this dictionary is consistently impressive. For example, Australian bludger (meanings ranging from ‘pimp’ to ‘lazy person’) is illustrated by thirty-six quotations, from 1898 to 2007; dinkum (adjective) is illustrated with sixteen quotations, from 1905 to 2005; and wowser (noun) with twenty-one, from 1899 to 2003. With non-regional and longstanding terms such as bastard, Green provides even more detailed evidence, with sixty-one citations for the noun, from 1675 to 2005, but along the way also pointing to some specific Australian uses of the term. American boondoggle (‘a waster of time, of money, of energy’, and applied especially to projects perceived to be a waste of taxpayers’ money), a more recent formation, receives six citations for the noun, from 1935 to 2000. This is the first slang dictionary to be convincingly based on the kind of scholarly citation evidence that is the core of the OED. In his Introduction, Green notes that he worked with a database of some 575,000 illustrative quotations, of which he uses about 415,000.

The dictionary also pays detailed attention to etymology, a task that is especially fraught with difficulties in a lexical realm where attempts to find an origin often lead to dead ends or to an endless proliferation of folk etymologies. Bludger is properly traced back to the violent bludgeon of the thief, dinkum to British dialect dinkum, meaning ‘a fair share of work’ (with not even a gesture to the oft-repeated Chinese ‘top gold’ red herring), and wowser to British dialect (but with a gesture to the possibility that it may have been an invention of John Norton, editor of the newspaper Truth, from 1896). In the past, compilers of slang dictionaries have often too easily become enmeshed in the alluring folk etymologies of the folk world of slang. Green knows too much about lexicography to fall for such chimeras.

This is the most significant dictionary of slang that has ever been produced. It is a work of profound scholarship and passion. We have now worked with it for some months at the Australian National Dictionary Centre, and turn to it again and again as an indispensable reference work. Get it.