A Thesaurus of English Dialect and Slang: England, Wales and the Channel Islands Jonnie Robinson Frontmatter More Information

Cambridge University Press 978-1-108-47323-1 — A Thesaurus of English Dialect and Slang: England, Wales and the Channel Islands Jonnie Robinson Frontmatter More Information

A Thesaurus of English Dialect and Slang

A thesaurus of present-day vernacular English from Berwick-upon-Tweed to the Channel Islands, this unique record of everyday English celebrates established regional dialects, emerging new varieties and colloquial forms young and old. Based on a survey devised by academics, BBC Voices Recordings, it documents the linguistic landscape of England, Wales and the Channel Islands in the twenty-first century, and includes over 3,000 separate entries, drawn from more than 200 locations. Each entry contains information about the term’s origins, location and the social distribution of its users. With links to original sound files and cross-references to complementary dictionary sources, it is an authoritative reference work for academic linguists, but its accessible presentation also makes it suitable for creative audiences and non-specialist language enthusiasts seeking authentic, up-to-date information on British English dialect and slang, and for English language teachers and learners as an invaluable educational tool.

Jonnie Robinson is the British Library’s Lead Curator of Spoken English. He has worked on two prestigious nationwide surveys of vernacular English: the Survey of English Dialects and BBC Voices. He co-curated the Library’s 2010 exhibition, Evolving English: One Language, Many Voices and created the British Accents and Dialects website.

© in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-1-108-47323-1 — A Thesaurus of English Dialect and Slang: England, Wales and the Channel Islands Jonnie Robinson Frontmatter More Information

A Thesaurus of English Dialect and Slang England, Wales and the Channel Islands

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JonnIE RoBInSon British Library, London

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www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108473231 DoI: 10.1017/9781108663144 © Jonnie Robinson 2021 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2021 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data names: Robinson, Jonathan, 1964– author. Title: A thesaurus of English dialect and slang : England, Wales and the Channel Islands / Jonnie Robinson, British Library, London. Description: Cambridge, United Kingdom ; new York, nY : Cambridge University Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCn 2020052560 | ISBn 9781108473231 (hardcover) | ISBn 9781108461078 (paperback) | ISBn 9781108663144 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: English language – Dialects – England – Glossaries, vocabularies, etc. | English language – Dialects – Wales – Glossaries, vocabularies, etc. | English language – Dialects – Channel Islands – Glossaries, vocabularies, etc. | English language – England – Slang – Glossaries, vocabularies, etc. | English language – Wales–Slang – Glossaries, vocabularies, etc. | English language – Channel Islands – Slang – Glossaries, vocabularies, etc. Classification: LCC PE1771 .R63 2021 | DDC 427.003–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020052560 ISBn 978-1-108-47323-1 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

ConTEnTS

Preface: The Voices Project [page vii] Introduction [1] Acknowledgements [x] i How to Use Thesaurus Sections 1 to 6 [1] List of Abbreviations and Transcription ii How to Use Thesaurus Sections A to K [4] Conventions [xi] iii Contributors [9]

Part I A Thesaurus of the BBC Voices Recordings in England, Wales and the Channel Islands

1 HoW You FEEl [47] 4.7 Kit of Tools [159] 1.1 Pleased [47] 4.8 Young Person in Cheap Trendy Clothes 1.2 Tired [52] and Jewellery [161] 1.3 Unwell [57] 4.9 Female Partner [171] 1.4 Hot [65] 4.10 Baby [177] 1.5 Cold [70] 1.6 Annoyed [76] 5 InsIDE AnD outsIDE [184] 5.1 To Rain Heavily [184] 2 WHAt You Do [84] 5.2 Toilet [190] 2.1 To Throw [84] 5.3 narrow Walkway Between or Alongside 2.2 To Play Truant [87] Buildings [199] 2.3 To Sleep [93] 5.4 Long Soft Seat in Main Room of 2.4 To Play a Game [101] House [203] 2.5 To Hit Hard [104] 5.5 Running Water Smaller Than a River [206] 3 WHAt tHEY WEAR [113] 5.6 Main Room of House (With TV) [208] 3.1 Clothes [113] 5.7 To Rain Lightly [212] 3.2 Trousers [118] 3.3 Child’s Soft Shoe Worn for PE [123] 6 GEttInG PERsonAl [215] 6.1 Rich [215] 4 WHAt You CAll tHEm [127] 6.2 Left-Handed [222] 4.1 Mother [127] 6.3 Unattractive [226] 4.2 Grandmother [131] 6.4 Lacking Money [237] 4.3 Male Partner [135] 6.5 Drunk [244] 4.4 Friend [141] 6.6 Pregnant [255] 4.5 Grandfather [146] 6.7 Attractive [263] 4.6 Word For Something Whose name You’ve 6.8 Insane [273] Forgotten [150] 6.9 Moody [286]

CONTENTS

Part II An Inventory of the BBC Voices Recordings survey in England, Wales and the Channel Islands

A noRtH EAst [299] Radio Suffolk BBC Radio Scotland BBC Essex Radio newcastle Radio Cleveland G soutH WEst [462] Radio Gloucestershire B YoRksHIRE AnD HumBER [315] Radio Wiltshire Radio York Radio Bristol Radio Leeds Somerset Sound Radio Humberside Radio Cornwall Radio Sheffield Radio Devon Radio Solent C noRtH WEst [341] Radio Cumbria H soutH EAst [498] Radio Lancashire Radio oxford BBC GMR Three Counties Radio Radio Merseyside Radio Berkshire Radio Kent D EAst mIDlAnDs [366] Southern Counties Radio Radio Lincolnshire Radio nottingham I lonDon [536] Radio Derby BBC London Radio Leicester BBC Asian network Radio northampton J WAlEs [548] E WEst mIDlAnDs [396] BBC Wales Radio Stoke Radio Shropshire k CHAnnEl IslAnDs [571] BBC WM Radio Jersey BBC Coventry & Warwickshire Radio Guernsey BBC Hereford & Worcester BBC Asian network Bibliography [595] F EAst AnGlIA [436] Radio norfolk Radio Cambridgeshire

PREFACE: THE VoICES PRoJECT

The Voices project was a unique collaboration between the British Broadcasting Corporation, the University of Leeds and the British Library to document the linguistic landscape of the United Kingdom at the start of the twenty-first century. Between May 2004 and July 2005, members of the public were invited to complete an online survey by submitting the words they used for a set of forty everyday notions (e.g. tired, to sleep, grandmother). Contributors supplied brief biographical details – age, gender, ethnicity, geographical background, education, occupation etc. – to enable researchers to analyse the responses to investigate geographical and/or social variation. The online survey was complemented by a sound recording programme in which group conversations were recorded with more than a thousand people from all walks of life talking about the same forty prompt words, and reflecting on the language they used and encountered in their daily lives. Results of the online survey were published selectively for a subset of the prompt words and short excerpts from the recorded conversations were uploaded as audio clips to the BBC Voices website, accompanied by articles on a range of linguistic topics contributed by BBC journalists and professional linguists. The initiative culminated in the summer of 2005 with regular broadcasts on BBC Local Radio, a BBC2 documentary, The Word on the Street (2005) and a six-part Radio 4 series, Word4Word (2005). A significant legacy of the collaboration is the crowdsourced data, archived at the University of Leeds, and a substantial audio archive, the BBC Voices Recordings, which was deposited at the British Library (BL) in november 2005. The latter consists of the entire set of 312 conversations recorded by BBC local and national radio stations. Predominantly conducted in English, the collection also includes thirty-one conversations in Scots (as defined by the participants themselves), nine in Welsh, five in Scots Gaelic, three in Irish, three in Ulster Scots, and one each in Manx and Guernsey French. To ensure the data were comparable across radio stations and between speaker groups, each conversation followed an innovative sociolinguistic methodology devised by researchers at the University of Leeds under the direction of Professor Clive Upton. In advance of a recording session, each participant was sent a ‘spidergram’ (see Figure 1) containing a set of prompts which BBC audio gatherers then used to initiate discussions about alternative words and to explore participants’ attitudes to language, the reactions of others to the way they speak, their reactions to other accents, the language of their parents and/or children, the role of education in language use, the influence of the media/popular culture and attitudes to swearing and ‘bad language’.

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PREFACE: THE VOICES PROJECT

Recordings vary in length, and individual recordists had different approaches to the amount of time they allowed to explore each prompt, but most conversations last about an hour and include discussions of every item. As kit of tools was a late addition to the set of prompts it does not appear in Figure 1 and is not discussed in some recordings. Individual numbers vary, but most of the thirty-seven Local Radio stations in England made five recordings with groups of speakers selected to be representative fo the different speech communities within their broadcast area. In addition, Radio Scotland made thirty-seven recordings; Radio Wales twenty-three; Radio Jersey four; Radio Guernsey five; Radio Ulster and Radio Foyle recorded twenty-four conversations in northern Ireland; and Manx Radio made six recordings on the Isle of Man. no survey can be entirely comprehensive and inevitably some varieties of English proved elusive, but every effort was made to visit rural and urban locations and to involve male and female contributors of all ages from a wide range of social, cultural and ethnic backgrounds. Participants included speakers of well-established dialects, members of elite social circles and recent migrant communities. In most cases, groups were made up of family members, close friends and long-time colleagues, or involved people with a common interest who were therefore already well acquainted and thus able to participate in a relaxed, informal discussion. In 2009 the BL secured a Leverhulme Trust grant for a three-year project, Voices of the UK, which enabled the Library to make the complete set of 283 conversations conducted in English, Scots and Ulster Scots available online (see sounds.bl.uk) and to recruit a team of researchers to create descriptions of the linguistic content of selected recordings. The researchers focused primarily on compiling inventories – one per recording location – of the lexical items supplied in response to the spidergram and, for a small subset of recordings, an index of incidental linguistic data that occurred spontaneously during the course of the conversations. TheVoices of the UK descriptions are available as PDFs attached to the corresponding sound recording at sounds.bl.uk and provide the raw data for this Thesaurus, which collates all the responses to the spidergram questionnaire captured in BBC Voices Recordings in England, Wales and the Channel Islands. This represents a total of 222 conversations from St Helier to the Scottish border recorded by 37 BBC Local Radio stations in England and BBC Radio Wales, BBC Asian network, BBC Radio Jersey, BBC Radio Guernsey and one recording made by BBC Radio Scotland in Berwick-upon-Tweed, northumberland. The data from the Isle of Man, Scotland and northern Ireland is currently being collated for subsequent publication. A full list of contributors for this volume is provided in Section (iii) of the Introduction, grouped by radio station and identified by location.

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PREFACE: THE VOICES PROJECT

to play truant hot to throw unwell to sleep cold what you how you do feel to play tired (a game) annoyed to hit hard pleased

left-handed unattractive

clothes rich lacking money what they getting wear List your personal drunk trousers words for... pregnant child's soft attractive shoes worn for PE moody insane

to rain lightly main room of house (with TV) grandmother mother

baby running water male partner smaller than inside & a river female outside friend what you call them partner long soft seat in main room grandfather young person to rain narrow walkway word for something in cheap trendy heavily between/alongside whose name clothes and jewellery toilet buildings you've forgotten

Figure 1 The BBCVoices Spidergram (Elmes 2013: 7) reproduced by permission of the School of English, University of Leeds

ACKnoWLEDGEMEnTS

I am extremely grateful to Helen Barton and to Isabel Collins at Cambridge University Press for their expert guidance in preparing this, my first reference work, and to the anonymous referees for their helpful comments on the pro- posal for this volume. I am indebted to Clive Upton for giving me my first dialectology opportunity in the Leeds Archive of Vernacular Culture at the University of Leeds and for his continued support before, during, and after the BBC Voices project. I would also like to thank the Leverhulme Trust for funding Voices of the UK, and my colleagues on that project, Holly Gilbert and Jon Herring, who assisted in compiling the data for this publication. Much of the work towards this thesaurus was completed at Southgate Hockey Club, so a special thanks to my children, Ben, Ellie and Ami, and to their teammates and coaches for providing such wonderfully entertaining matches to watch (or umpire) by way of distraction. I would not have been able to complete this work without the support of my family and especially my wife, Alison, and so my final thanks goes to them.

ABBREVIATIonS AnD TRAnSCRIPTIon ConVEnTIonS

Dictionaries, glossaries and reference works that deal with national and international varieties of English, and bilingual and monolingual dictionaries of languages other than English are initialised and/or presented in italics throughout this volume as identified below. Full details of these publica- tions and sources with a more local or regional focus are provided in the Bibliography.

ADEP Allen’s Dictionary of English Phrases (Allen, 2008) AID American Idioms Dictionary (Spears, 2007) APDU Aussie Phrases Down Under (McInnes, 2014) BDP&F Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase & Fable (Dent, 2012) BSD British Slang Dictionary (online) CantoDict Cantonese and Mandarin Dictionary (online) CD Collins Dictionary (online) CDEI Cassell’s Dictionary of English Idioms (Fergusson, 2003) CDO Cambridge Dictionary online (online) CE–P Collins English to Portuguese Dictionary (online) CF–E Collins French to English Dictionary (online) CGEL Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (Quirk et al., 1985) CID Cambridge Idioms Dictionary (Cambridge University Press, 2006) CI–E Collins Italian to English Dictionary (online) CP–ED Comprehensive Persian–English Dictionary (Steingass, 1892) CRS Cockney Rhyming Slang: London’s Famous Secret Language (online) CTEL Collins Thesaurus of the English Language (Brookes, 2008) CUD Concise Ulster Dictionary (oxford University Press, 1996) DA–G Dictiounnaire Angllais–Guernésiais (De Garis, 1982) DARE Dictionary of American Regional English (online) DBB Dictionary of Business Bullshit (Duncan, 2013) DC Dictionary Central (online) DCEU Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage (Allsop & Allsop, 1996) DCPBA Dictionary of Catch Phrases British and American from the Sixteenth Century to the Present Day (Partridge, 1985) DCS Dictionary of Contemporary Slang (Thorne, 2014) DECT&T Dictionary of the English/Creole of Trinidad & Tobago (Winer, 2009)

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS AND TRANSCRIPTION CONVENTIONS

DEG Dialect of the English Gypsies (Smart & Crofton, 1875) DES&C Dictionary of English Slang & Colloquialisms (Duckworth, 1996–2020) DETA Dictionary of Epithets and Terms of Address (Dunkling, 1990) DH-E Dictionary of Hiberno-English (Dolon, 2013) DJ–A Dictionnaithe Jèrriais–Angliais (Société Jersiaise, 2005) DJE Dictionary of Jamaican English (Cassidy & Le Page, 1980) DMC Dictionary of Mauritian Creole (Baker & Hookoomsing, 1987) DMWA Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic (Wehr & Cowan, 1979) DNE Dictionary of newfoundland English (Story et al., 1982) DPCYA Dictionary of Post-Classical Yemeni Arabic (Piamenta, 1990) DSL Dictionary of the Scots Language (online) DSSE Dictionary of Singlish and Singapore English (online) DUCHE Dictionary of Urdu, Classical Hindi, and English (Platts, 1884) E–CD English–Creole Dictionary (Goswami-Sewtohul, 1997) EDD English Dialect Dictionary (online) FD Free Dictionary (online) FDMEU Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage (Butterfield, 2015) FDP&GS Fantabulosa: A Dictionary of Polari and Gay Slang (Baker, 2002) FFDAR Facts on File Dictionary of American Regionalisms (Hendrickson, 2000) FunDict Fun Dictionary (online) GD Guyanese Dictionary (online) GDS Green’s Dictionary of Slang (online) G–EDI German–English Dictionary of Idioms (Schemann, 1995) GJ Gypsy Jib: A Romany Dictionary (Hayward, 2003) GJT Glossary of Jewish Terms (online) GPC Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru. A Dictionary of the Welsh Language (online) HTLL How to Talk Like a Local (Dent, 2010) IMDb Internet Movie Database (online) IS Irish Slang (online) JP Jamaican Patwah (online) KEPN Key to English Place-names (online) KTL Kitchen Table Lingo (English Project, 2008) L2W Lingo 2 Word (online) LAS Linguistic Atlas of Scotland (Mather & Speitel, 1975–1986) LDCE Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (online) LEX Lexico (online) MD Macmillan Dictionary (online) M-WD Merriam-Webster Dictionary (online) NCED nelson Contemporary English Dictionary (Cunningham, 1978) NID Maggie Muff’s norn Iron Dictionary (Harker, 2013) NOAD new oxford American Dictionary (McKean, 2005)

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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS AND TRANSCRIPTION CONVENTIONS

NPD new Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (Dalzell & Victor, 2015) NP–ED new Persian–English Dictionary (Hayyim, 1934) NRCE new Register of Caribbean English (Allsop, 2010) ODE oxford Dictionary of Euphemisms (Holder, 2003) ODEI oxford Dictionary of English Idioms (Cowie & Mackin, 1993) ODNR oxford Dictionary of nursery Rhymes (opie & opie, 1951) ODPS online Dictionary of Playground Slang (online) OED oxford English Dictionary (online) OSD online Slang Dictionary (online) PD Panjabi Dictionary (Singh, 1895) PDC Penguin Dictionary of Clichés (Creswell, 2000) PF Phrase Finder (online) PH–ED A Practical Hindi–English Dictionary (Caturvedī, 1970) PONS PonS Polish to English Dictionary (online) RFSI Roud Folk Song Index (online) RPD Rasta/Patois Dictionary and Phrases/Proverbs (online) RPMF Roger’s Profanisaurus: The Magna Farta (Viz, 2007) RRT-D Romani Rokkeripen To-Divvus (Acton & Kenrick, 1984) RST Roget’s Super Thesaurus (McCutcheon, 2010) SD&P Somali–English English–Somali Dictionary & Phrasebook (Awde, 2006) SEBD Shabdkosh English Bengali Dictionary (online) SED Survey of English Dialects: The Dictionary and Grammar (Upton et al., 1994) SEGD Shabdkosh English Gujarati Dictionary (online) SEHD Shabdkosh English Hindi Dictionary (online) SEPD Shabdkosh English Punjabi Dictionary (online) SETD Shabdkosh English Telugu Dictionary (online) streetmap Streetmap (online) SUOMI Suomienglantisanakirja (online) T–ED A Telugu–English Dictionary (Gwynn, 1991) THT The Hamely Tongue (Fenton, 2000) TTEM Thesaurus of Traditional English Metaphors (Wilkinson, 2002) UD Urban Dictionary (online) WDP Wordsworth Dictionary of Proverbs (Apperson et al., 2006) WGDS Wiktionary Glossary of Drinking Slang (online) Wikipedia Wikipedia (online) Wiktionary Wiktionary (online) WIW Caribbean Dictionary (online) Wordnik Wordnik (online) YDO Yiddish Dictionary online (online)

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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS AND TRANSCRIPTION CONVENTIONS

other abbreviations and transcription conventions used: A. Cantlow Aston Cantlow adv. adverb b. born B & B bed and breakfast (i.e. guest house) B’ham Birmingham BL British Library Camb. Cambridge cf. compare Dorch. Dorchester DIY do-it-yourself DJ disc jockey esp. especially excl. exclamation GB Great Britain HGV heavy goods vehicle HMP Her Majesty’s Prison HR human resources incl. including K’minster Kidderminster K. norton Kings norton KST kiss-teeth IT information technology L1 indicates speaker’s native language (e.g. L1 Hindi) L2 indicates fluency in second language (e.g. L2 English) L. Colney London Colney M’boro Middlesbrough MC master of ceremonies M. Haven Milford Haven M. Keynes Milton Keynes M. newton Maiden newton MoD Ministry of Defence n.d. no date n’hampton northampton nHS national Health Service (publicly-funded UK healthcare system) nI northern Ireland n.k. not known n St Cyres newton St Cyres PAST past form of verb indicated PASTnEG past form of verb indicated with negative marking PDF Portable Document Format PE physical education PR public relations

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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS AND TRANSCRIPTION CONVENTIONS

PRES present indicative of verb indicated PRESnEG present indicative of verb indicated with negative marking RAF Royal Air Force RoI Republic of Ireland RP received pronunciation S. Shields South Shields St And. St Andrews sth. something t’ indicates the realised as sound (or as glottal stop) th’ indicates the realised as sound TV television tx. transmission (i.e. broadcast date) UK United Kingdom US United States (i.e. American) USA United States of America usu. usually vb. verb vbl. verbal W’borough Wellingborough W’hampton Wolverhampton WW1 World War one WW2 World War Two … indicates utterance presumed to be incomplete […] indicates ellipsis (i.e. word/part of word omitted) name indicates form containing a real person’s name place indicates form containing a real place H. A. P. P. Y. upper case letters separated by full stops indicates form spelt out loud * use varies; see relevant Section Introduction • use varies; see relevant Section Introduction ° use varies; see relevant Section Introduction