In the world of slang, sex slang is about as good as it gets. You can pretend to be appalled by this slang, if not the sexual practices described, but if you weren’t amused with the wit and creativity of unconventional vocabulary you wouldn’t be holding this book in your hands in the first place.
We are hard-wired for a linguistic resourcefulness that always matches, and usually surpasses, our physical and sexual invention. Most sexual slang represents practices as old as the ages – newly discovered, of course, by the next generation. New sexual activity is extremely rare but you will find there’s always a word for it in these pages.

The need for slang as an intimate language and defender of moral transgression is readily apparent. As the next generation is always inventing sex for the first time sex can never be entirely conventional. The excitement of discovery and danger, of outrage and rebellion against the mainstream, is evident in this small dictionary of sex slang.

This volume consists of approximately 3,000 headword entries drawn in large part from our New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, in which we recorded slang and unconventional English heard anywhere in the English-speaking world any time since 1945. In that work and here we included pidgin, Creolized English and borrowed foreign terms used by English speakers in primarily English-language conversation. We excluded no term on the ground that it might be considered offensive as a racial, ethnic, religious, sexual or other slur.
This dictionary contains many entries and citations that will, and should, offend.

We used UK spelling for definitions and our commentary but used indigenous spelling for headwords and citations. This is especially relevant in the case of the UK arse and US ass. For Yiddish words, we used Leo Rostens spelling, which favours sh- over sch-. An initialism is shown in upper case without full stops (for example, BJ), except that acronyms (pronounced like individual lexical items) are lower case (for example, milf).

Phrases are, as a rule, placed under their first significant word. For example, the phrase ‘get your ashes hauled’ is listed as a phrase under the headword ash. By this placement scheme, we sought to avoid the endless pages of entries starting with prepositions or common verbs such as get. In dealing with slang from all seven continents, we encountered more than a few culture-specific term’s. For such terms, we identified the domain or geographic location of the term’s
usage. We used conventional English in the definitions, turning to slang only when it is both substantially more economical than the use of conventional English and readily understood by the average reader.

The country of origin reflects the origin of the earliest citation found for the headword. As is the case with dating, further research will undoubtedly produce a shift in the country of origin for a number of our entries. We resolutely avoided guesswork and informed opinion.
We recognize that the accurate dating of slang is far more difficult than dating conventional language. Virtually every word in our lexicon is spoken before it is written, and this is especially true of unconventional terms. We dated a term to indicate the earliest citation that we discovered. For each entry, we included a quotation, a citation or a gloss explaining where the term was collected. Sheer joy is often found expressed in these quotations, while the citations and glosses give a sense of when and where the term was found.