Jonathon Green

Jonathon Green (born 20 April 1948 in Kidderminster, Worcestershire) is an English lexicographer of slang and writer on the history of alternative cultures. Jonathon Green is often referred to as the English-speaking world’s leading lexicographer of slang, and has even been described as 'The most acclaimed British lexicographer since Johnson'.

Of Jewish origin, Green was educated at Bedford School (1961-1965) and Brasenose College, Oxford (1966-1969) where he read history.

An author, freelance journalist, broadcaster and lecturer, Green's primary activity is the collection and analysis of slang. To this end, he has amassed a database, which – according to Green – holds around 125,000 slang words and phrases, underpinned by over 550,000 citations (examples of usage). It covers English-language slang since the 16th century and offers the vocabularies of the UK, US, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and the anglophone Caribbean. This database provides a resource for all his slang-related publications.

For Green, slang is as much a part of the greater English language as any other of its sub-sets such as dialect or technicalities. But unlike those, it opts for an actively oppositional role. With a conscious acknowledgement of the counterculture of the 1960s (in which he played a part and of which he has written) he has termed slang the ‘counter-language’ and more recently ‘the language that says "no"'. Born at the margins it has remained there, even if the secrecy that lay at the heart of older slang cannot resist the information flow of the modern world.

The sixties counterculture was the subject of his first oral history, Days in the Life: Voices from the English Underground 1961-1971 (1988), for which he "interviewed more than 100 of "the main players", acquiring 500,000 words on tape and a 400,000-word manuscript; "the book emerged around half this length." The study All Dressed Up: The Sixties and the Counterculture (1998) was the source of litigation, from both former Beatle George Harrison and artist Caroline Coon, and was withdrawn for 12 months. In June 2000, Coon received damages of £40,000, plus £33,000 costs, from publisher Random House, for the false claims Green had made.

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