BBC Learning English
Keep Your English Up To Date
21st September 2010
Minging
There s no getting away from it. We human beings seem to be at our most inventive when
we re thinking up words to insult each other with. A select list of adjectives we ve applied
over the past hundred years to people or things we find disgusting would include scroungy ,
skanky , manky , icky , grotty , grungy , poxy , scuzzy , onkus (that s Australian),
yucky , snotty , septic , gross & I could go on.
One recent addition to this armoury of scorn is especially versatile and, given its history,
fairly pungent. It s minging :
That curry he cooked up for us last night was really minging.
We have Scotland to thank for it. In Scottish English, ming is an old word for a bad smell,
so originally minging meant smelly as it still can.
But of course calling someone smelly is a perfect way of insulting them, and around the year
2000 British teenagers started using it more broadly to mean disgusting . It can also mean
ugly or unattractive , and in an interesting development similar to stinking , you can use it
to say someone is drunk:
He d only had two pints and he was minging.
And along with minging there s minger . Now calling someone a minger is a really bad
insult. It often implies ugly person . If you said someone s girlfriend was a minger you d be
at serious risk of a punch on the nose.
Keep Your English Up To Date © British Broadcasting Corporation 2010
Page 1 of 2
bbclearningenglish.com
John Ayto is a lexicographer and a writer on words and language. He began his dictionary
career as one of the editors of the first edition of the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary
English, and over the past twenty years he has produced a range of his own books on the
history and use of words, including the Bloomsbury Dictionary of Word Origins, the Oxford
Dictionary of Modern Slang and Twentieth-Century Words, a survey of the new words that
came into the English language during the twentieth century. He edited the 17th edition of
Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, and he has broadcast extensively on lexical matters.
Keep Your English Up To Date © British Broadcasting Corporation 2010
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bbclearningenglish.com
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