The Oxford English Dictionary etymology for slang begins by saying that it is “of cant origin.”  I wouldn’t have known what “cant origin” meant before I started digging through dictionaries.

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What we now call slang was once called cant.

So off I go to the entry for cant.

Evidently from about 500 to about 200 years ago the dialect of thieves and beggars in England was called cant.

This was for the same reason that the person in who chants in a church or synagogue is sometimes called a cantor. Before cant meant “slang,” it meant “sing,” so the cantor was the singer and the sound of the whiny pleadings of the beggars reminded people of this canting.

An old dictionary I once came across first alerted me to the meaning of cant.

It’s from 1699 and is the oldest slang dictionary and is called

A new dictionary of the terms ancient and modern of the canting crew in its several tribes of Gypsies, beggars, thieves, cheats etc.

So according to the OED the word slang was once slang itself but it came into English too late to be included in the dictionary of the canting crew. 

Slang is a little over 200 years old as an English word.

Even though the OED makes a point of doubting slang’s ancestry in Norwegian, several other etymological sources do point that way. Etymonline.com asks us to compare other Norwegian words including slengenamn meaning “nickname,” slengja kjeften which literally means “to sling the jaw” but figuratively comes out as “verbal abuse.”

I’ve talked before about Urbandictionary as a source of information on words.

I think it’s particularly valuable when it comes to slang.

The website has to be approached with caution because it is unmoderated and some of the material that people post can be quite offensive. There certainly isn’t any academic rigor or certification behind the definitions that appear there.

But if slang be the free expression of the people, then an unregulated site like urbandictionary is likely the best place to see new words or new word meanings as they come into use.