Showing 1-10 of 13 entries tagged
“1980s”
in your dreams!
The sarcastic interjection ‘in your (or my, her, his, etc.) dreams’ is familiar in everyday spoken English, but the earliest evidence our editors have found comes from a Usenet post in 1986. We suspect that it may have been used earlier […]
FAQ
FAQ is an initialism from ‘Frequently Asked Questions’, used as the name for a list of questions and answers. The term was originally associated with the Usenet discussion system, and has been attributed to Eugene N. Miya, researcher at NASA, […]
bimble
The word ‘bimble’, meaning ‘to move at a leisurely pace’, is sometimes said to have originated amongst British soldiers serving in the Falklands […]
party animal
When the OED added its entry for ‘party animal’, meaning ‘an exuberant reveler’, in 2005, the earliest quotation we were able to include was from 1982, but we knew that the term could almost certainly […]
numpty
Since the mid-1980s, ‘numpty’ has been used as a mild term of abuse in Britain. The earliest evidence […]
luvvie
In British use, luvvie is a humorously depreciative term for an actor, especially one regarded as effusive or affected. The reference is to a stereotype of thespians habitually addressing people as ‘lovey’. When the OED revised its entry for lovey in 2008, this sense, which had by then become established in the variant spelling luvvie, was […]
Long Island iced tea
The creation of this potent cocktail is widely attributed to bartender Robert C. Butt, who entered the recipe in a contest at the Oak Beach Inn nightclub on Long Island, New York, in the early 1970s, according to […]
def
The word ‘def’, meaning ‘excellent; outstanding; “cool”’ is one of the earliest and most prominent terms to come to mainstream slang from […]
heart attack on a plate
A particularly unhealthy meal (especially one which is high in saturated fat) is sometimes called, with gallows humour, […]
backwash
‘Backwash’ is a chiefly American, colloquial term referring to the mixture of saliva and beverage that flows back into the beverage container after one takes a drink. It’s relatively recent; the earliest evidence OED researchers have found thus far dates to […]