The Outdated Slang Words We Want to Bring Back

“Like stylish clothing and modes of popular entertainment, effective slang must be new, appealing, and able to gain acceptance in a group quickly,” wrote Tom McArthur in the Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language. “Nothing is more damaging to status in the group than using old slang.”

The point of slang is not just to communicate meaning but to assert identity. Sadly, this means that with each new wave of slang words, preceding generations feel their relevance and very grip on the modern world slip further away. But the slang of times past continues to be documented online, and the networking effect means that along with new terminology, older argot may be swept back into use.

To find which outdated slang words web users most want to bring back, WordTips calculated the upvote and downvote rate of classic slang terms on Urban Dictionary. Whether Boomers are upvoting these slang terms in a cringe effort to relive their glory days or Zoomers are embracing the cool jive of yesteryear for vintage street cred is for you to decide.

What We Did

We curated a seed list of the most notable outdated slang across different categories: insults, dating and British and American slang. Then, we ranked the slang words/phrases we most and least want to bring back by their proportion of upvotes and downvotes on Urban Dictionary.  

Key Findings

• Buzzkill is the American slang word we most want to bring back, with a 96.23% upvote rate.
• The five least-loved old British slang phrases are Canny, Take The Mickey, Bonk, Wangle and Fancy.
• Wingman is the outdated dating slang we most want to bring back, with a 95.66% upvote rate.
• The insult we most want to bring back is Scoundrel, with a 96.15% upvote rate.

Old-School American Slang We Want to Bring Back

Who killed buzzkill? America’s most-missed slang word originated at some point in the early 1990s when dejected Gen Xers put together the words “buzz” and “kill” because “killjoy” was not grungy enough to capture the levels of teenage dejection as everybody ruined everything. 

The term was quickly gobbled up by MTV, which named a short-lived hidden camera show Buzzkill in 1996, and the word itself feels oddly ‘90s-colored. However, reports of Buzzkill’s death appear to be exaggerated: Google’s Ngram Viewer shows that annual usage of the word continues to rise.

And who yoinked yoink from us? Yoink is a verb for snatching something without permission or an exclamation to say while doing so. The word is associated with classic Simpsons moments, beginning with Homer yoinking back the wad of notes Marge found in his pants after he quit spending money on Duff.

Simpsons writer George Meyer yoinked the word from Archie Comics. Literary usage of the term peaked between 2009 and 2011; apparently, today’s youth are more likely to yeet than to yoink.

Old-School American Slang We’re Glad Isn’t Popular

If we miss Simpsons and MTV-style slang, the sunsetting of ‘90s hip-hop vernacular is not such a loss. Playa is the world’s most despised old-school American slang. Urban Dictionary rather genteelly calls a playa “a juvenile male who carries a paging device, works in fast-food service, and has one or more illegitimate children.”

But playing the field is no longer something to brag about as a man, if being a playa is even possible in this day and age:  “The overall picture [is] that if a woman is going to go on a date with a man, chances are it’s not for a casual fling,” as professor emeritus of psychology Ronald Levant told the New York Post.

A pair of slang words popularized by ‘90s movies are also on the 2020s hit list. “Not!” is a “not really” synonym that Wayne’s World’s Mike Myers grew up with as a “suburban, heavy metal, adolescent.” It’s a joke that’s since been used by three presidents and a UK prime minister, so you can see why it’s not cool anymore.

And then there’s Monet, named for the French impressionist painter and used in the Amy Heckerling film Clueless:

Alicia Silverstone: “She's a full-on Monet.”

Brittany Murphy: “What's a Monet?” 

Alicia Silverstone: “It's like the paintings, see? From far away, it's OK, but up close, it’s a big old mess.”

Vintage British Slang We Want to Bring Back

If your fake posh or cockney British accent is good enough, it can be difficult to tell if the slang you use is real or entirely made up. British slang tends to be either abrupt and consonanty (chuffed, sod off, nowt) or a long and convoluted probable allusion to some forgotten moment of colonial history (Bob's Your Uncle), or both (Chockablock).

The internet’s favorite old Brit slang, however, is more straightforward: bloody is a 14th-century word meaning “involving bloodshed” and later “bloodthirsty, cruel, tainted with blood-crimes.” It has been “a British intensive swear word at least since 1676” — Lexicographer Samuel L. Johnson thought it “very vulgar.” In case it’s not convoluted enough for you, consider that in polite company, it’s referred to as “the Shavian adjective” after George Bernard Shaw included it in the text for his elocution-themed play, Pygmalion.

Vintage British Slang We’re Glad Isn’t Popular

Our analysis of unpopular old British slang words all but proves that the UK is no more real a place than Middle-earth.

The number one word is from a place that many Brits themselves have failed to verify as real: Tyneside, a region comprising Newcastle-upon-Tyne and its surroundings, with its own dialect known as Geordie. The Geordie word canny means “Good, nice or pleasant,” according to locals — but 52.62% of Urban Dictionary users would rather be rid of it.

Second-worst Take the Mickey is rhyming slang for “take the piss” (make fun of), with Mickey being short for Mickey Bliss. However, to back up the theory that Britain isn’t real, there doesn’t seem to be a real or fictitious character with this name beyond his appearance in this phrase.

There follows a pentuplet of British words that could very well be the roster of the Hogwarts basketball team: Bonk, Wangle, Fancy, Dench and Mug. Meaning, respectively: copulate, manipulate, desire, first-rate and fool.

The Dating Slang People Miss the Most

As if dating isn’t confusing enough, people keep changing the words. Every generation develops its own dating argot, whether inspired by the pop culture romances of the time or the particular technologies involved.

“To deem a person ‘my boo’ is to effectively designate that person as one’s sweetheart,” WSJ tells us (by extension, both the boo and the booee might be considered “boo’d up”). Boo has actually traveled with us across cultures: it comes from the French word ‘beau’ (lovely), which made its way into the dating scene of 18th-century England and enjoyed a resurgence following Usher and Alicia Keys’ hit record, My Boo, in 2004.

Dear John refers to the sort of break-up letter that World War II squaddies might expect to receive from their loved ones back home. “Dear John: I don’t know quite how to begin but I just want to say that Joe Doakes came to town on furlough the other night and he looked very handsome in his uniform, so when he asked me for a date…” goes the example given in a 1943 article on the trending topic. (Damn it — my former wingman Joe Doakes?) However, this popularly upvoted slang phrase is having a resurgence courtesy of the eponymous Taylor Swift song.

The Insult Slang People Miss the Most

Even the columnists at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services get that a “sick burn” is far more likely to be a powerful insult than an infected blistering. But despite efforts to breathe new life into the art form, some of today’s most popular insults can be traced back to the Bible.

And Urban Dictionary users show a distinct preference for some centuries-old European-rooted insult slang such as dunderhead (perhaps from the Middle Dutch for “thunder”) and fop (originally from the German “to jeer at, make a fool of,” but taking on the sense of a posh and ridiculous dandy around the time of the Macaroni craze. Yes, that Macaroni craze).

Scoundrel has a remarkable 96.15% upvote rate. It may come from old Latin and French terms meaning “to hide away,” but the oldest known use in its modern(ish) form is from the 1580s: skowndrell, “base, mean, worthless fellow.” Somehow, the very sound of the word seems to conjure the precise mixture of audacious rascalry, moral bankruptcy and general sneaking around with which we associate the scoundrel today.

Game Over

Parents and the perpetually bemused may welcome a return to the “proper” slang of yesteryear — before everything was shortened to initials and teen cant was spread across the secretive youth network known as TikTok. But trying to prevent the evolution of slang may as well be flogging a dead horse, tilting at windmills or banging their head against walls.

Even those professionals who might benefit from a slowdown in the evolution of slang tend to remain open to its new manifestations: “linguists don’t believe in correct and incorrect language. We’re very interested in what people do with language,” says BYU Assistant Professor of Linguistics, Lisa Morgan Johnson.

And in the networked age, slang moves on quicker and quicker. Struggling to learn the meaning of rizz, slay and cringe? Don’t worry — they’ve already been banished to obscurity.

Methodology

We began our analysis by crafting a seed list of the most notable outdated slang across different categories: insults, dating, British and American slang. Here’s an example of one source used to gather slang.

We then ranked the slang words/phrases we most want to bring back by their proportion of upvotes on Urban Dictionary and the least popular words/phrases by their proportion of downvotes.

This study was completed in April 2024.