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Chambers Slang Dictionary

On sale

24th October 2008

Price: £30

Selected:  Hardcover / ISBN-13: 9780550104397

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Chambers Slang Dictionary is a brand-new edition of Jonathon Green’s magisterial slang dictionary, first published in 1998. Covering the full range of slang over five centuries and from all parts of the English-speaking world, this collection has won universal acclaim for its authority, comprehensiveness and browsability.

This new edition, the first to be published by Chambers, retains all the verve and precision of the earlier work. The text has been completely overhauled and restructured to make it as accessible as possible. Anyone interested in the seamier side of language will have hours of sheer joy exploring the vast wealth of information this book contains and plumbing the depths of centuries of slang.

What's Inside

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Reviews

The Sunday Telegraph
To winch the dictionary onto your knee and open its pages is like entering an orchard full of strange and wonderful fruit.
Camden New Journal
A mighty tome dedicated to language's seedier denizens.
Boyd Tonkin, The Independent
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.
Henry Hitchings, The Times
Whether one trawls the pages of Green's dictionary or merely glances at them, rich discoveries are certain.
Martin Amis, Experience
Mr Slang, aka Jonathon Green
Mark Sanderson, Sunday Telegraph
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.
John Walsh, The Independent
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.
Miles Kington, The Independent
Magnificent... I felt quite pale after a while at the endless catalogue of things we do to each other
Andrew Marr, Daily Telegraph
Dr Johnson would have moaned with delight.