#BRITISH SLANG WORDS AND MEANINGS TV#

Typically used ‘up north’ (in Northern England), ‘west’ is used as an alternative way of saying ‘crazy’, ‘weird’ or ‘ridiculous’ and can be both positive or negative.įriend 2: Yeah, it was crazy. To describe something as ‘long’ in a traditional sense describes it as being lengthy or taking a lot of time, such as “How long is a piece of string?” or “It’s a long way to my house.” But in the streets, ‘long’ is used in a more emotional way to express something as being a great deal of effort or something that someone doesn’t want to do.Įxample: “I can’t be arsed to sit the exam tomorrow, it’s so long fam.” Originally a noun for the top of a mountain or cliff edge, ‘peak’ in the streets is used as an adjective to describe something as absolutely terrible. But in the streets, ‘bare’ means ‘very’, ‘really’ or ‘a lot of’.Įxample: “I wanted to crash at her house, but she had bare cats and they were bare noisy and I was bare tired, so I just went home.” Now, new nouns and adjectives are easy to add to a language, but new adverbs? This is what I love about the English language and British culture especially! ‘Bare’ is originally an adjective meaning ‘without clothes’, for example, the collocation ‘bare feet’. Sister 2: Swifty ain’t whack, she’s sick! Sister 1: Turn your music down, it’s so whack! We also use the verb ‘to whack’ meaning ‘hit’, for example, “She whacked him really hard” but its most common usage is as a negative descriptive. When we describe things as ‘whack’ it means it’s very bad or unbelievable. Read Also: 10 Popular English Gen Z Slang Words and Where They Came From

I’ve got sick on my shoe”), somewhere along the line, the word ‘sick’ has been ameliorated to mean ‘good’, ‘cool’, or ‘awesome’.įriend 1: I’m going on holiday next week.įriend 1: Italy, bro. And when used as a noun, ‘piff’ is a type of purple cannabis.Įxample: “Yo, check out that gyal she is piff ting!”įrom the verb ‘to be sick’ meaning ‘unwell’, (“I feel sick”) to the noun ‘sick’ which is a synonym of ‘vomit’ (“I’ve just been sick. With a similar definition to ‘peng’, ‘piff’ means tasty or nice, but is more widely used to describe how attractive someone looks. Meaning delicious or tasty, ‘peng’ can be used to describe a meal or a person.Įxample: “Damn, this tastes peng.” or “Yo, you look peng ya kno.” Nowadays, ‘init’ or ‘innit’ is no longer used as a question and is much more often used as a statement of agreement.įriend 1: Let’s stay in and watch The Great British Bake Off, it’s so good. This was originally a colloquial way of using the tag question, ‘isn’t it?’ at the end of a sentence, for example, “It’s cold today, isn’t it?” But as we became less polite and more assertive in informal contexts, we began to instead say, “Cold today init.” So here’s a list of 20 of the best British terms and phrases that I can guarantee you didn’t learn in school, and you can see how we put the ‘great’ in Great Britain: 1.

But there’s nothing quite like raw, grungy lingo from the pits of British streets - because real life in England, Scotland and Wales is far from “tally-ho” and tea parties like you see in the popular period dramas.

#BRITISH SLANG WORDS AND MEANINGS TV#

Perhaps academically, you’ve been taught useful vocabulary, phrasal verbs and standardised collocations that you can use worldwide, and perhaps on your own through watching TV or movies you’ve learnt slang terms and informal grammar usage from the US or other native-speaking countries. British youths of today still edit, change and adapt the language in hundreds of new ways every year, as our unique and absurd culture, personalities and informalities continue to create our unique society and therefore the evolution of the English language. Despite the ‘American accent’ being the easiest for most ESL speakers to copy, English began in England, in the heart of Great Britain, 1600 years before the language reached America or anywhere else in the world.

British slang words and meanings