British Slang: 100+ Words Ranked by How British They Are

British slang is the informal English people use in the UK: bloke for a man, knackered for very tired, skint for broke. The lists that rank on Google pile hundreds of these together without saying which ones a British person would actually say today.

So we took every word from the five top-ranking lists, 307 in all, and checked how often each appears in British books compared with American books. Some are more than ten times as common in British English. And several "very British" phrases peaked before the Second World War.

The short answer

If you only learn ten, make them these: bloke (a man), quid (a pound), cuppa (a cup of tea), knackered (very tired), skint (broke), chuffed (pleased), daft (silly), dodgy (suspicious), cheeky (a little rude, in a fun way) and innit (isn't it). All ten are on at least two of the top lists and appear 3 to 8 times more often in British books than in American ones.

Skip pip pip, what ho, top hole and by jove. They peaked in British books between the 1900s and the 1930s and are now printed at a quarter to a third of that level.

How we measured 307 British slang words

We collected every entry from the five lists Google ranks highest in the US for "british slang": Oxford International English Schools, Tandem, Berlitz, EC English and Contiki, read on 2026-11-03. After merging repeats, that made 307 different words and phrases. The lists agree on very little: only three words are on all five (bloke, quid and gutted), and 228 of the 307 (74%) appear on just one list.

We then counted each one in the Google Books Ngram Viewer, which covers millions of books (Michel et al., 2011), comparing British and American English for 2010 to 2019. "5x" means five times as many uses per million words in British books.

Two limits. First, 132 entries (43%) are spelled exactly like an everyday word or a name, such as well, dead, fit, tea, mate or git, so books can't separate the slang sense and we gave those no number. Second, books are not speech, and Google's British books include some American ones, so the real gap is probably bigger.

For the 164 words we could measure on both sides, the typical one is 3.9 times more common in British books, and 108 are at least 3 times more British. But 19 are used about as much in American books. It is the method we used for our study of fancy words.

How much more often each word appears in British books than in American books, 2010 to 2019. 1 means equal use. Data: Google Books Ngram. Chart by Mindomax.

British slang for people

Bloke is the one to learn first: at 4.2 uses per million words it is the most printed people word we could measure. Mate is everywhere too, but it is also an ordinary word, so books can't measure it.

Money slang

Pounds are quid, and quid takes no s: ten quid, never ten quids. We left out "quid pro quo", which American books use more.

Food and drink

Cuppa is 4 times more common in British books and printed more than 70 times as often as in the 1930s.

How you feel

Gutted is on all five lists but is also an ordinary word (a gutted building), so we measured "absolutely gutted": it is 8.3 times more common in British books. "Chuffed to bits" is 9.8 times more British.

Describing things

Minging tops this group at 13.4 times.

Doing things

Bagsy, a children's word for claiming something first, is 12.3 times more common in British books.

Everyday phrases and exclamations

Innit, a tag like "isn't it" at the end of a sentence, was almost absent from print before the 1970s and is now 7.6 times more common in British books. Cambridge Dictionary marks blimey and crikey as old-fashioned, yet British books print both more than ever.

Rude words and drinking slang

Bloody is printed 31 times per million words in British books, more than any other word we could measure. It is mild, but several words below are labelled offensive by Cambridge Dictionary. Watch pissed (UK drunk, US angry) and pants (UK underwear, US trousers), and note that in the UK fag can mean a cigarette, while in the US it is an offensive slur.

Cockney rhyming slang and regional words

Rhyming slang swaps a word for a phrase that rhymes with it, then often drops the rhyme: "have a butcher's" means have a look (butcher's hook). Most of it is rare in print: dog and bone appears about 6 times per billion words of British books.

From Berlitz's regional tables and Oxford International's list:

Old "posh" slang to skip

Several entries sound like an old film, and British books show why: these phrases peaked a century ago, long before knackered, gobsmacked and innit took off.

Each line is scaled to its own peak decade. Data: Google Books Ngram, British English, 1900 to 2019. Chart by Mindomax.

Cheerio, jolly good and righto sit in between: Cambridge marks cheerio and righto as old-fashioned, but all three are still printed at 86% to 96% of their 1930s peak.

Slang on these lists that isn't very British

These are used almost as much in American books. Fine to use, but they won't make you sound British.

How to remember British slang

Watching British TV helps, but slowly. In 88 British and American TV programs, Webb and Rodgers (2009) found that the 3,000 most common word families, plus names, cover about 95% of the words, while rarer words come up only a few times. Slang is rare: even knackered appears about once per two million words of British books.

Webb (2007) found that about ten encounters with a new word in context can produce sizeable gains, and full knowledge may take more. So don't wait to meet each word ten times. Pick the 20 or 30 you actually hear, and put each on a flashcard with an example sentence.

Then test yourself instead of rereading. In Karpicke and Roediger (2008), repeated testing on foreign-language words produced a large gain at a later test, while repeated studying added nothing. Spacing the reviews over several days also beats one long session (Cepeda et al., 2006). More on both in why self-testing works, how spaced repetition works and how to study with flashcards.

Learn to understand first and use later: many of these words signal region, class or rudeness in ways a definition can't show.

Tools that help you learn British slang

Dictionaries and podcasts show you the words; flashcard apps make you recall them. Prices are from the US App Store and Google Play, checked on 2026-11-03.

For more apps, see the best vocabulary apps; for more methods, how to improve your vocabulary.

If you want your new slang on flashcards with the reviews spaced for you, you can try Mindomax for free.