Days In The Life

Jonathon Green is one of the world’s leading lexicographers of English-language slang. His most recent dictionaries are Green’s Dictionary of Slang (3 vols, 2010) and the Chambers Slang Dictionary (2008). Among other slang-related titles he has also written The Slang Thesaurus, Slang Down the Ages: The Historical Development of Slang and Crooked Talk: The Language of Underworld. His history of lexicography – Chasing the Sun: Dictionary-Makers and the Dictionaries They Made – was published by Jonathan Cape in 1996.

During the ‘hippie era’ that forms the background for Days in the Life he worked on various ‘underground newspapers’, notably Rolling Stone, Friends, Oz, IT and Time Out. He has also written oral histories focussed on immigration (Them, 1990) and sex (It, 1993). The Sound of the Streets: a History of Slang is due for publication in 2014 and he is currently working on a memoir of 30 years of slang lexicography: Odd Job Man, to be published by Jonathan Cape.