Related reading: Green has a brief introduction to GDoS Online on the site’s blog, and a post at Wordnik on the project’s fraught history. So go visit, bookmark, explore, and, if you can, subscribe to Green’s Dictionary of Slang Online. Institutional subs are available on enquiry. The rest (citations, timeline, full search) are for subscribers: initially £49 ($60) a year for single users, £10 ($12.50) for students. The basics (headword, definition, etymology) are freely available to the public. Will these treasures be exsie (Aus.), laanie (S.Afr., 1975), higher than a cat’s back (US, 1882)? Negatory! (US military, 1955) There are two levels of access. As the press release puts it: ‘Those who wish to know how many words James Joyce used for sexual intercourse or Charles Dickens for drunk will find their answers. Green’s Dictionary of Slang Online can be searched for definitions, first uses, etymologies, parts of speech, authors, titles, usage labels, etc. 10,000 entries have been antedated since 2010 (Green: ‘Words are always older than you think’).410,000 citations – examples of usage – are now 650,000.Like any good monster, GDoS Online just keeps growing: If the lexicographer’s problem was once where to look, it is now in assessing at which point one dare stop looking. GDoS Online builds on GDoS’s mass of research and adds a ton more, with regular updates scheduled and geographical scope to be continually extended. Websites too must play catch-up, but they can do it better and much faster. GDoS in print was necessarily a snapshot, frozen at one point in time: a huge record of centuries of slang, but unable to keep up with the latest shifts and shimmies of linguistic creativity. Kendal, sees the official launch of Green’s Dictionary of Slang Online. Today, thanks to sterling work by web developer David P. I’ve been beta-testing the website and can report it is a beautiful thing, vast and wondrous, filthy and fabulous, endlessly diverting and eye-opening. First published in print as a three-volume behemoth in 2010, to awards and rave reviews, it now emerges in digital form with about 30% ‘revised, augmented and generally improved’. Green’s Dictionary of Slang is the culmination of a life’s work for Green. It has since been superseded: instead of CDoS I now turn to GDoS. I have several slang dictionaries for various countries or lexical domains, but CDoS was the most generally useful. Whenever I had a query about slang (and I’ve had many), or felt like a random trawl through the underbelly of language (which was often), my first port of call, traditionally, was Chambers Dictionary of Slang by Jonathon Green.
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