bare

Bare does the job "loads of" does, in one syllable, and that is most of its appeal. It sits straight in front of the noun and takes no "of" with it. You say bare people, never bare of people.

The split between its two jobs has been counted. A study of the London English Corpus logged 264 uses of the word. Just over 73 per cent were the quantifier, and about 25 per cent were the intensifier. So both are real, and one is roughly three times more common.

The intensifier is the younger half. In that same corpus it turns up only in the speech of teenagers, with no recorded uses by adults. That is a useful signal: saying a film was bare long marks you more sharply by age than saying there were bare people there.

One thing it is not. The word carries no rude edge and no insult. It is a plain measure of amount, closer to "loads" than to any kind of judgment.

The exact route is unclear, and two published accounts compete. Both agree the slang sense reached London through Caribbean speech and spread as part of Multicultural London English, the dialect that grew up in multi-ethnic London.

Green's Dictionary of Slang labels the entry "UK black teen" and traces it to Barbadian English bare, meaning "nothing but" or "too much of." On that account "nothing but people" slid into "loads of people," which makes the modern sense a short step rather than a reversal.

The other account is a reversal. The linguists who counted the corpus tokens concluded that speakers are playing with opposites here, taking a word that means naked or uncovered and using it for abundance. They put it beside sick and wicked, which flipped the same way. Both accounts are peer-reviewed or published reference work, so the entry names both rather than picking one.

Dating is fuzzier than it looks. Green's earliest citation is from 1997, but it is spelled bere. The first citation spelled bare is from 2003. By 2013 the word was well enough known that a London school banned it, along with other slang, in a widely reported decision.