Green’s Dictionary of Slang

Acknowledgements for the Online Edition

In the first place I should draw users’ attention to the Acknowledgments pages as laid out in the print edition. I remain hugely grateful to everyone whose names are included there.

For GDoS Online my first, and perhaps greatest thanks should go to Philippe Climent and his team at IDM in France. In 2012, quite unexpectedly, Philippe took it upon himself to offer me a free subscription to the program (DPS) that IDM have created and which I (as do several major reference publishers) use for the research database on which all data is collected. Without that generosity this work would almost certainly not exist.

I have no reluctance in noting again those who, during the past often highly frustrating years, have maintained their encouragement for what I have been trying to do in taking GDoS off the page and moving it on line. The lexicography of slang is by its nature a solitary path. This last five years have been exceptionally so. With their support they have all rendered it far less lonely, and I am very grateful.

I play no favourites by placing them, unsurprisingly, in alphabetical order:

I would also like to make mention of the late Madeline Kripke, the doyenne of dictionary collection, who sadly died aged 76, a victim of Covid-19, in April 2020. I have written at length about Madeline for the Dictionary Society of North America's journal Dictionaries. She was a central figure in the world of slang lexicography and all of us who are involved remain in her debt.

In addition, indeed in pride of place as regards her contribution to research, I must once more thank Susie Ford. I have long since lost count of the number of citations she has added to the dictionary; I can only say that without her continuing dedication it would be an infinitely lesser work.

In addition to his general help, as acknowledged above, I am especially grateful to Jesse Sheidlower for continuing the development of this Online Edition of GDoS, and for hosting the site itself.

The work of the independent Australian scholar Dr Gary Simes (1950–2017) has already been sampled for GDoS. Aside from a variety of general publications, often on gay themes, his Dictionary of Australian Underworld Slang, featuring two hitherto little-known glossaries of criminal jargon, was published in 1993, and a major discussion of early gay speech, ‘Gay Slang Lexicography’, was featured in the specialist journal Dictionaries volume 26 (2005). When he died in 2017 he was at work on his magnum opus, the Dictionary of the Language of Sex and Sexuality in Modern English. Like the OED and this dictionary, it is prepared ‘on historical principles’, i.e. underpinning each headword and its senses with a chronological list of citations of usage.

It would, undoubtedly, have been a major contribution to lexicography in general and that of (gay) sexuality in particular. Nonetheless, even though the project could not be finished, and absent substantial funding will never be so, Dr Simes had typed up a manuscript from the many file cards which – he never placed his findings into a digitised database - held his research. The MS is far from complete, but a substantial amount exists and much of the research, especially as regards slang, has never so far been included in a dictionary.

It is thus a text that deserves wider circulation. To that end, and thanks to the trustees of Dr Simes' estate and GDoS contributing editor James Lambert, who is responsible for safeguarding and overseeing the use of the physical materials, we have been allowed to see the MS, and to extract from it for GDoS use such slang-based material as seems valuable. This is a lengthy task and will doubtless consume many months work. Extracted text will appear under the tag Simes:DLSS and new tranches will become available as the regular 90-day updates continue. The first appeared in April 2025, and offers materials from A and a portion of B.

The original concept, design, and development of Green’s Dictionary of Slang Online was made by Daphne Preston-Kendal.