Slang time machine
Every English slang term has a moment it first showed up in print or on someone's lips. We've tagged 4,786 terms with a first attested decade — from 18th-century thieves’ cant through to 2020s internet vocabulary. Pick a decade below.
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1860s — 38 terms
Showing top 38 by views60
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Lincoln
1865bluesky
🔊Met
1863🔊
chuck wagon
1860🔊
Copperheadism
1860🔊
skat
1864🔊
scad
1869🔊
chiseler
1860🔊
walkabout
1861bluesky
🔊rep by pop
1867🔊
AB
1860🔊
bicycle
1868bluesky
🔊scrimshaw
1865🔊
on the up-and-up
1863🔊
Saxon
1860bluesky
🔊carburetor
1862bluesky
🔊picky
1860bluesky
🔊Reb
1862🔊
slaw
1861bluesky
🔊humbug
1864bluesky
🔊hellhole
1866bluesky
🔊gasoline
1862bluesky
🔊moke
1860🔊
akether
1867🔊
Sainsbo's
1869🔊
honyock
1860🔊
farb
1863🔊
red cent
1864bluesky
🔊Quaker gun
1862🔊
Dad and Dave
1868🔊
Peter Witt
1869🔊
Gandhigiri
1869🔊
tenderfoot
1866🔊
rising of the moon
1865🔊
poteen
1869🔊
dumbocracy
1869🔊
Down syndrome
1860🔊
down the banks
1862🔊
Juneteenth
1865bluesky
🔊More on how slang travels through time
The lifecycle of a slang word
Mint, scale, ironize, retire — how every viral term moves through the same five stages.
Where slang is born now
The platforms and subcultures that mint vocabulary in 2026 — and why TikTok shifted everything.
AAVE and internet slang
The single biggest source of new mainstream English vocabulary, and why most of the words you used today started here.
Attestation dates come from etymologies originally sourced from Wiktionary contributors (CC BY-SA 4.0) and editorial expansion authored on Slangora. They reflect the earliest documented use we found for each term, not necessarily the moment it was coined.