Before we look at your book selection, could you tell us what slang is? Slang is difficult because everything about it defies simple classification. Nobody knows the etymology of the word slang. If ...

In an episode of Hulu docuseries “The Kardashians,” matriarch and momager Kris Jenner posed a prescient etymological question to her daughter Khloe Kardashian in the midst of getting all dolled up.

If you've ever talked about drag, camp, butches, and/or trade, you know at least some words from Polari, a secret gay language adopted by gay men in the United Kingdom between the 1920s and the 1960s.

Flipping through the thin pages of a dictionary, it can be hard to imagine the humans who actually put the thing together, deciding how each word would be defined and discovering how it trickled down ...

The other day, I overheard my 18-year-old daughter chatting with her friends. Between bursts of laughter, she said someone had ...

Slang is probably as old as human language, though the first slang dictionaries only started popping up in the 16th century. But nothing has been a boon for slang lexicography like the digital age, as ...

If you ever call your partner ‘bae’ or complain that you’re ‘hangry’ you’re officially using some of America’s most annoying slang, according to new research. A new study examining the use and ...

I know that when I begin talking about slang, I enter dangerous territory. Slang is a touchy subject. Often, the slang of a younger generation is considered an atrocity by the older generation.

"All slang words are detestable from the lips of ladies," Eliza Leslie said in 1867. She was the author of the Behavior Book, a 19th century etiquette manual published in Philadelphia. How times have ...

THE AUSTRALIAN attachment to slanguage (slang language) goes back to the earliest settlements of English speakers in Australia. As Edward Gibbon Wakefield noted in his 1829 Letter from Sydney: The ...