Chambers Slang Dictionary

Jonathon Green is the world’s leading expert on this maligned but fascinating part of our language, and under his editorship, Chambers Slang Dictionary has been fully revised and updated to cover the range of slang from all over the English-speaking world. From ‘aachibombo’ to ‘zum-zum’, five centuries of usage take us from the 16th-century ‘bullfinch’ (a simpleton) to the very modern ‘geekware’ (technology marketed to geeks). Along the way we encounter ‘shufti’ (from Arabic), ‘blah’ (from German) and ‘pimp’ (from French). We also find 3,000 words for drunk, 1,500 for copulation and ‘a glorious taxonomy of the flesh and its indulgence’.