| Year | Word | Etymology / cultural importance | OED: First occurrence | COHA: First occurrence | COHA: History |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1835 | loaf | Though the word "loaf" referring to bread has existed far into the past of the English language, the reference to idling one's time away came into the language in the 1800s. It likely was a modified form of the German word "Landläufer", after which Läufer became loafer, and the rest is history. | 1838 | 1838. Loafing on the stalls is jist as bad as rolling among the dishes. | [loaf] One occurence in the 1830s with a slow increase through the 1890s, after which it peaked in the 1900s due to two publications published that have a semantically different meaning of the word. It then dropped in 1910, plateauing through the 1950s, and slowly dropped to uncommon use. |
| 1855 | bluejeans | Although jeans existed as the article of clothing in England in the 1840s and as the material as early as the 1560s, blue jeans found their true identity among everyday Americans, being durable and reliable for all forms of work. One politician, James Douglass Williams, garnered votes from the working class and eventually earned the nickname "Blue Jeans" Williams due to his use of the workingman's material. | 1855 | 1884. he was not a little surprised to see a boy by the door in patched blue-jeans pantaloons that were too short, | [blue-jeans] [blue jeans] After isolated occurences of the variants from the 1880s to the 1910s, there was a massive increase in the 1920s due to a publication with a main character named Blue Jeans, a lull for the next 20 years, then a steady increase from the 1950s on. |
| 1875 | P.D.Q. | This phrase, meaning "pretty damn quick", came from a play called "The Mighty Dollar", which was peppered with such initialisms. The reason this came into the language was likely simply because it was the first in the play; more important is that the use of initials became widely popular in the U.S. around this time. | 1875 P.D.Q., 1995 PDQ | 1880. That's right, you'd better step P.D.Q., pretty damn quick. | [P*D*Q*] [P*D*Q] [pretty damn quick] This phrase rarely occured in the corpus, with an average of less than once per decade. Note: The corpus labels the original source as being from 1880, but this work was actually published in 1875. |
| 1895 | hot dog | The joke that sausages came from dog meat was an old one, but they first were called "dogs" by students at Yale, sold at a stand called "The Kennel Club", and "hot" was quickly appended. Independently, around the same time "hot dog" also came to mean a well-dressed young man, which now is used to describe something flashy. | 1893 (n), 1896 (adj), 1893 (int) | 1906. Say! let's all go down to Rammy's and get a hot dog. | [hotdog] [hot-dog] [hot dog] Steady increase from the 1920s to the 1990s, and a small decline in the 2000s. |
| 1915 | flapper | This term originally simply meant young girl, but leading up to the Roaring Twenties it came to mean a young lady that considered herself free from conventional standards of behavior, which opened up an era of feminism which at this time succeeded in women's suffrage. The period of gaiety and levity was quickly crushed with the onset of the Great Depression, and it took with it this word. | 1888 | 1917. By Jove, Phyllis, there's one now, the flapper I saw in the dining-room lately. | [flapper] After jumping from nigh nothing in the 1920s, it dropped back down to a constant yet much lower usage from the 1930s to the present. |
| 1935 | boondoggle | The origin of this word is unknown, but its meaning as we know it has been consistent. The first known makers of boondoggles were Boy Scouts, who were giving projects to keep them occupied. With public works emerging during the Great Depression, millions of dollars were spent by the government to keep Americans busy. The purpose and efficacy of said projects were the subject of debate, and thus by some were described as boondoggles. | 1935 (n, v) | 1936. After gravely considering their problem they announced that they had agreed on this boondoggle: | [boondoggle] Steady increase of usage from the 1930s to present. |
| 1955 | hotline | During the Cold War, hotlines were developed as direct lines from one red telephone to another in order to warn specific parties of Soviet air attacks at a moment's notice. Businesses quickly caught onto the idea, and soon became more associated to the services provided rather than the physical line. | 1954 | 1959. Supersalesman Culligan is making the most of NBC's "hotline" service for handling fast-breaking news. | [hotline] [hot line] After a few sporadic appearances in the 1950s and 1960s, there was a steady increase from the 1970s to the 1990s, and it appears to perhaps be a drop in usage as of the 2000s. |
| 1975 | substance | Substance was adopted into English via Latin several centuries, but was adopted as a word to describe several mind-altering agents, such as alcohol and drugs, in the 1970s, perhaps in reaction to the hippie movement that occured a bit earlier. | 1975 | 1978. Sonny, who formerly headed the state drug abuse program and who now runs Substance Abuse Services, | [substance] [substance abuse] A couple of appearances in the 1970s, increasing in the 1980s, and shooting upwards in the 1990s to present. |