Cockney Rhyming Slang

Cockney Rhyming Slang: The Complete Dictionary

Cockney rhyming slang is the linguistic system in which a word is replaced by a phrase that rhymes with it, and then frequently the rhyming element is dropped, leaving only the non-rhyming element, which bears no phonetic relationship to the original word at all. This is either a brilliant system for confusing outsiders or a completely impractical approach to communication that has somehow become an enduring cultural institution. It is, in fact, both.

The Origins

Cockney rhyming slang emerged in the East End of London in the mid-nineteenth century. The most commonly cited explanation is that it was developed by market traders, criminals, or both, as a form of coded language that would be unintelligible to police officers and other outsiders. Whether this explanation is entirely accurate is disputed by linguists, but it captures something true about the slang’s function: it creates an in-group of speakers who understand it and an out-group who do not. The London Transport Museum and The Museum of London both hold materials on East London’s linguistic history.

How It Works: The Three-Step Process

Step one: identify the word you wish to replace. Stairs. Step two: find a phrase that rhymes with it. Apples and pears. Step three: use only the first element of the rhyming phrase. Apples. The result: up the apples means up the stairs, and a speaker who does not know the system has been given no usable information. This is the mechanism in its pure form. In practice, many rhyming slang terms have become so embedded in London speech that they are used without conscious awareness of the rhyming mechanism.

The Essential Vocabulary

Plates of meat: feet. Dog and bone: phone. Adam and Eve: believe (as in I don’t Adam and Eve it). Trouble and strife: wife. Rosie Lee: tea. Brown bread: dead. Mince pies: eyes. Whistle and flute: suit. Tom and Dick: sick. Rabbit and pork: talk (as in he does rabbit on). Barnet Fair: hair. Plates of meat have been feet for so long that several speakers use plates without knowing why. Collins Dictionary maintains one of the more comprehensive publicly available rhyming slang references.

Modern Additions: The Living Language

Cockney rhyming slang is not a historical artifact but a living linguistic system that continues to generate new terms. Some of the more recent additions use celebrity names as the rhyming element: Britney Spears for beers. Ruby Murray for curry. Plates of meat remain plates, but the plates are increasingly joined by terms that reveal when they were coined by the cultural references they contain. The celebrity-based additions are the most dateable element of the vocabulary and, for that reason, the most interesting to the linguistic archaeologist.

Where It Is Actually Used

Genuine Cockney rhyming slang, used unselfconsciously as a first language rather than performed for tourists or television, is now relatively rare in London itself. The population of the traditional East End has dispersed to Essex, to Kent, and to other parts of the country, taking the slang with them. What remains in the East End is partly authentic continuation and partly the deliberate maintenance of a cultural identity. The slang most visitors encounter in London – on markets, in certain pubs, occasionally from taxi drivers – contains genuine elements and performed elements in proportions that vary by speaker. Both are real. The performance is itself a form of cultural continuity: you maintain a tradition by performing it, even when the performance is knowingly theatrical.

The Irresistible Comedy of the System

The comic potential of Cockney rhyming slang is inherent in its mechanism. The moment when someone unfamiliar with a term encounters it and cannot decode it is a comedy of pure information asymmetry: two people in the same conversation with fundamentally different understandings of what has been said. The moment when the rhyming element is explained – dog and bone, telephone, do you see – produces a specific pleasure that is part recognition, part revelation, and part appreciation for a system that could produce this particular solution to the problem of saying telephone. The British genius for making the unnecessary elaborate is nowhere more productively expressed.