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RR 2010/116 Chambers Slang Dictionary Jonathon Green Chambers Edinburgh 2008 xxxiii + 1477 pp. ISBN 978 0 550 10439 7 (hbck); ISBN 978 0 550 10442 7 (pbck) £30 (hbck); £14.99 (pbck)
Keywords Dictionaries, English language
Review DOI 10.1108/09504121011030733
Chambers Slang Dictionary is styled in the cover blurb, but not on the title-page, as a new edition of the same compiler's 1998 Cassells' Dictionary of Slang (RR 1999/153). Jonathon Green earlier edited Dictionary of Jargon (Routledge, 1987) and is currently working on a multi-volume dictionary of slang "on historical principles" due out soon from Chambers.
Green usefully provides a short overview of major slang dictionaries of English which he divides into three periods: the "canting" or criminal slang dictionaries of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries; the "vulgar tongue" works of the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century; and the "modern" productions that have appeared since. ("Cant" from "cantare", to sing, refers to the sing-song plaints of contemporary beggars.) Commencing with Robert Copeland's Hye Way to the Spyttlell Hous (c. 1535) and John Awdelen's The Fraternitye of the Vacabondes of 48 headwords in 1561, we progress to the internet's Urban Dictionary which "may be inaccurate and puerile, but online is undoubtedly the way ahead. A search for 'slang dictionary' brings up 635,000 hits on Google".
Of course, one quickly comes up against what one means by "slang", but Green is clear about this: "Slang is the...