Historical Dictionary of American Slang
Edited by J.E. Lighter Continuing the ground-breaking work started almost two decades ago, Oxford University Press is proud to announce it has acquired and will complete the Historical Dictionary of American Slang. Edited by Dr. Jonathan E. Lighter, HDAS is a landmark work of scholarship covering more than 300 years of popular American English. It is the first comprehensive dictionary of English-language slang in the United States based on the principles of historical lexicography exemplified by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). The Historical Dictionary of American Slang is based on a corpus of more than 10,000 sources read for their potential slang content. The texts include fiction, drama, history, academic scholarship, diaries and letters, song lyrics, Internet discussions, television broadcasts, screenplays, unpublished works, original fieldwork, and journalism. Subject areas include military, Black English, folklore, jazz, the Beat era, drug and alcohol use, teen slang, politics, and more. Distinguishing features of the dictionary:
- It is based upon research that was undertaken specifically to recover and document U.S. slang, to the exclusion of standard, colloquial, dialectal, and technical terms.
- When finished, the four HDAS volumes will include more than 35,000 slang entries, several times more than in any other dictionary of English slang.
- The dictionary is the first to provide full, dated citations of usage illustrating the special nontechnical vocabularies of socially defined U.S. speech communities whose language has received less-than-adequate attention from previous scholarly dictionaries. Every sense of every word included is illustrated with dated citations, ranging from the earliest example found to the most recent.
- It is the first slang dictionary to be edited according to a clearly enunciated and usefully restrictive definition of the word slang itself. Its material is drawn chiefly from actual running text, not from previous glossaries or dictionaries of words claimed to be current.
