Dictionary of American Slang

by Harold Wentworth and Stuart Berg Flexner

Book Overview

Dollars to doughnuts, your reference shelf lacks a good slang dictionary, and that's a fine how-de-do. Whether you're a stuffy writer looking to gussy up your prose, a poindexter who thinks studying... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0690006705
• ISBN13: 9780690006704
• Release Date: January 1975
• Publisher: Crowell
• Length: 766 Pages
• Weight: 2.70 lbs.

Customer Reviews

One Indispensible Reference

If you're into words, slang, and idioms like I am, then you probably already own a reference book like this and realize that you need at least 2-3 similar books to find the real nuances of meaning that you want.This book definitely qualifies to be one of them. The definitions are thoughtful and precise, and there are significantly fewer 'disappointments' (at lousy or omitted definitions/terms) than with other books of it's kind.

Great reference for non-native American speakers

The book seems not as "eduactional" as other heritage or historical dictionaries proclaimed to be but it is really of great help to a non-native American speaker, like me, who from Taiwan to get indepth of American ways of life. Whenever I run across an expression in American movies or TV sit-coms, not very often I fail to get the satisfactory explanation with the detailed notes and usages. Therefore I picked up expressions such as: refrigerator mother, fag, net-sex, digital sex and so forth, that frequently used in American movie lines or even in real life but taken to be the "taboo words" in English-Chinese dictionary. Slangs have no any color of offensivenss but depends on how people use them. It is a pity for the international lanuages learners if they think the slang is not good enough to pick up. Once you have a command of slang, you will be really into lives of slang users

Excellent resource

This dictionary is an absolute must-have for every writer, fiction or nonfiction. We haven't found a better slang dictionary yet. It has virtually all the slang words in there, words that you just won't find anywhere else. One of the very nice and helpful features is that it tells you in what year the word was used first and susequently, and in which publication (book or newspaper, etc.), and how the meaning changed over the course of the decades. The dictionary also has sentence examples on how the word was used, e.g. in which context, so you know exactly when and how to use it in your applications. It's just very interesting to find out the original meaning and usage of certain slang words and to enrich your own vocabulary. We highly recommend it!

Probably the Best of Three Slang Dictionaries I Skimmed

In the library, I did a side-by-side comparison of this book (Chapman: Dictionary of American Slang, 3rd ed., 1995) with: (a) Spears, Richard: NTC's Dictionary of American Slang and Colloquial Expressions, 3rd ed., 2000 and (b) Green, Jonathon: Cassell Dictionary of Slang, 1998. The advantages of this dictionary over the other two are: (1) some words and phrases are in this book but not the other two (e.g., "love bug," "love me, love my dog"); (2) it gives specific quotations and sources (e.g., "Had Feldstein deliberately low-balled the original numbers? - Newsweek"); (3) it indicates what sort of people originated or might use the word/phrase (e.g. "lot louse... [used in the] circus"); and (4) thorough cross-references are integrated into the body of the dictionary (e.g., "love, see CALF LOVE, FOR THE LOVE OF PETE, PUPPY LOVE"). It has 617 pages and claims to have 19,000 entries, which is between the other two books. On the other hand, the Cassell Dictionary contains a large percentage of the entries in this book as well as many more entries, and it's the oldest of the three dictionaries. Still, if you had to buy only one of the three, this is probably the one to get.

A true way to solidify your American heritage

The regional and social diversity of American English presents a great many problems, if you ain't into something (say a subculture like surfing) you probably ain't know squat about it. The average American only knows "general slang." This book breaks down the barriers of subcultures allowing anyone, foreign or local to involve himself/herself in the subtlety of authentic American street lingo. Even if you think you know it all, get the book, you'll be surprised.