The ''Historical Dictionary of American Slang'', often abbreviated ''HDAS'', is a

dictionary A dictionary is a listing of lexemes from the lexicon of one or more specific languages, often arranged alphabetically (or by radical and stroke for ideographic languages), which may include information on definitions, usage, etymologies ...

of American

slang Slang is vocabulary (words, phrases, and linguistic usages) of an informal register, common in spoken conversation but avoided in formal writing. It also sometimes refers to the language generally exclusive to the members of particular in-gro ...

. The first two volumes, ''Volume 1, A – G'' (1994), and ''Volume 2, H – O'' (1997), were published by

Random House Random House is an American book publisher and the largest general-interest paperback publisher in the world. The company has several independently managed subsidiaries around the world. It is part of Penguin Random House, which is owned by Germ ...

, and the work then was known as the ''Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang'', sometimes abbreviated as ''RHHDAS''. Both volumes used the same ISBN, ; the paperback editions are for Volume 1 and for Volume 2.

Background

When Random House discontinued publication,

Oxford University Press Oxford University Press (OUP) is the university press of the University of Oxford. It is the largest university press in the world, and its printing history dates back to the 1480s. Having been officially granted the legal right to print books ...

announced in 2003 that it would publish the two remaining volumes, ''Volume 3, P – S

art 1 Art is a diverse range of human behavior, human activity, and resulting product, that involves creative or imagination, imaginative talent expressive of technical proficiency, beauty, emotional power, or conceptual ideas. There is no genera ...

', , and ''Volume 4, S

art 2 Art is a diverse range of human activity, and resulting product, that involves creative or imaginative talent expressive of technical proficiency, beauty, emotional power, or conceptual ideas. There is no generally agreed definition of wha ...

– Z''. As of 2020, however, those volumes have not yet been published. Each entry includes representative quotations, including the earliest quotation using the word. HDAS is edited by Jonathan E. Lighter of the

University of Tennessee The University of Tennessee (officially The University of Tennessee, Knoxville; or UT Knoxville; UTK; or UT) is a public land-grant research university in Knoxville, Tennessee. Founded in 1794, two years before Tennessee became the 16th state, ...

. It is sometimes compared to '' Green's Dictionary of Slang'', which takes a generally similar approach but is not focused specifically on American slang. The ''HDAS'' is not to be confused with the ''DAS'', the ''Dictionary of American Slang'' (1975).

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Historical Dictionary Of American Slang English dictionaries American slang Random House books Oxford dictionaries Historical dictionaries