peng

Peng is one of the core compliments of modern British slang. Call a person peng and you mean they are seriously attractive. Call food or things peng and you just mean excellent. In practice, the food use is at least as common. "This curry is peng" carries no flirting at all.

The spin-off phrase "peng ting" means an attractive person, usually a woman. It has a laddish edge that plain peng does not. It can treat the person a little like an object, so watch who you say it around. Peng sits in a family of UK slang about looks, next to leng, a close relative that works the same way. Peng once sounded edgy and specifically London. Now it is a safe, warm compliment across the UK for anyone under about thirty-five. And it travels. Toronto and Australian youth slang have both picked it up.

Peng comes out of Black British youth speech in London in the early-to-mid 2000s. Linguists call that dialect Multicultural London English. The earliest firm dictionary example is from 2005, in "Keisha the Sket," a story London teenagers passed from phone to phone. Grime and UK drill music carried the word far beyond the city through the mid-2010s. By 2017, fieldwork (research done with real speakers) found that people recognized it even in rural England. The word's deeper origin is unresolved. One theory says peng is a shortened form of "kushempeng," a Jamaican Patois word for high-grade cannabis. Another says it comes from "pong," by way of the smell of potent weed. Both routes run through Jamaican-influenced London speech, and both pass through cannabis slang. No dictionary commits to either theory. The exact origin is unclear.