Chambers Slang Dictionary

Jonathon Green is Britain's foremost lexicographer of slang. His many publications include Chambers Slang Dictionary, The Slang Thesaurus and Slang Down the Ages. He has also compiled dictionaries of quotations and oral histories of modern culture.

To winch the dictionary onto your knee and open its pages is like entering an orchard full of strange and wonderful fruit. -- Chav? That's SO September 10th - Seven magazine, The Sunday Telegraph 20081026 A mighty tome dedicated to language's seedier denizens. -- 'Green's search for slanging match', Camden New Journal 20081030 The most-acclaimed British lexicographer since Johnson has every right to blow off ("late 18th century: to boast, to brag". What did you think?) as he wraps up a new edition of this most mind-bendingly addictive guide to taboo talk. -- Boyd Tonkin, The Independent 20081128 Whether one trawls the pages of Green's dictionary or merely glances at them, rich discoveries are certain. -- 'Fulham virgins and other slang pleasures', Harry Hitchings, The Times 20090206 'Mr Slang, aka Jonathon Green' -- Martin Amis, Experience 20090206 Jonathon Green's Chambers Slang Dictionary... contains more than 4,500 words for drink, 4,000 for drugs, 2,400 for idiots and 634 for buttocks.It covers five centuries of language from the wrong side of the tracks, but it is the youngest entries that provide some of the greatest amusement. A Giorgio Armani, for example, in rhyming slang, is a sarnie and a squirrel-kisser is an environmentalist. -- Mark Sanderson, Literary Life, Sunday Telegraph 20080920 Jonathon Green is the nation's indefatigable lexicographer of filth, a tireless troweller in the slurry of the unsayable. His Cassell's Dictionary of Slang (1998) and Chambers Slang Dictionary (2008) are phenomenal compendia of "non-standard usages," ranging across the whole lexicon of English bar-room coinages. -- John Walsh, 'Hail to the Professor of Profanity', The Independent 20081112