The English-to-American Dictionary

Blurb - Cockney rhyming slang

The reason I'm including this is because a lot of words in this dictionary have their derivations in rhyming slang, and I'm now including a few of the most oft-used rhyming slang phrases. Right now is where I'd write a little bit of blurb about how rhyming slang came about, but in case you hadn't sussed it out already my development system with this piece of work is to write "someone help me with this bit" and then when a generous fellow mails me the information I was after I pass it off as my own and they became another faceless name on my contributor list. So, someone want to help me with this "where it came from" bit?

Cockney rhyming slang is a pretty simple if somewhat odd affair. It basically consists of a couplet of words, the second of which rhymes with the word you're actually aiming at. For example, the word "glasses" is represented by the phrase "Aristotle Onassis" (a Greek shipping magnate), and "look" by "butcher's hook". To further complicate matters, you can use only the first word of the couplet to refer to the word you're ultimately aiming at - so your Aristotles are your glasses, and you can take a butchers out of them at the scenery once you've put them on.

I think it would be fair to say that outside of the east end of London, Cockney rhyming slang is much more often talked about than actually used. Some phrases (e.g. "butchers" in the example above) are in fairly common usage country-wide, but others (e.g. Aristotles) are not. I've tried to put the most widely used ones into the dictionary. Whether I've succeeded or not I'm not too bothered; as I've mentioned a few times you haven't payed a cent for this so you can take what you're goddamned given.