The official dictionary of unofficial english

This book is the result of hunting on the Internet for unrecorded words. In these pages, you’ll find words you’ve never seen before—even though they’ve been around for decades. You’ll find old words with new definitions. You’ll find foreign words tiptoeing into foreign Englishes, sports jargon butting into politics, street slang bouncing out of California, and Spanish moving comfortably into mainstream American English. From dozens of countries, from politics and sports, slang and jargon, humdrum to extraordinary, new and old, what you’ll read is language that deserves a little more attention.

Although it may look like it at first glance, not all of these words are new. Many are, but more than a few have histories spanning decades or even a century. They all share, however, two characteristics. One, they are undocumented or underdocumented. This means that there is more to be said about them than has so far appeared in other dictionaries. Two, they are interesting in and of themselves, either as cultural artifacts, for their history, or even just for the way they roll off the tongue.