From Ghosting to Going Steady, Here's a Guide to the History of Dating Slang

The first time I ever heard the phrase “breadcrumbing,” a label for sending flirty yet non-committal text messages—literal breadcrumbs!—I felt like the English language was staring into my soul. Struggling to survive the dating scene in millennial Los Angeles, my friends and I have all been subjected to a dreaded, "Heyyyyy bb, gotta raincheck this time but def wanna chill soon." Now it had a name, legitimizing its cursed existence, alongside “ghosting,” “haunting,” and other eerie entries in the contemporary glossary of love.

This got me thinking about dating slang of decades past, like “going steady,” or “making love.” Figuring out how changes in language reflect bigger cultural shifts is my personal obsession as a linguist—and is the basis of my new book, Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language. From throwback expressions like “making a mixtape” to contemporary phrases like “Netflix & chill,” it seems that the dating lingo we’ve used throughout history is not just fun wordplay; it says something about society’s approach to sex, love, and intimacy at large.

So how exactly have the ways people talk about dating evolved over time, and what does it say about our attitudes toward love in general? Actually, “dating” wasn’t even a thing until a little over 100 years ago—prior to the 20th Century, says Steph Koyfman, senior content producer at Babbel's podcast Multilinguish, people were matched strategically via the totally businesslike contract of “courtship.” No dating? No slang to go along with it. Only after the dating process became more loosey-goosey did we come up with fun words to narrate these wacky new experiences.

We sometimes romanticize the old-fashioned slang our grandparents used to talk about love over icy terms like “breadcrumbing,” but when you look at the language closely, it shows that wasn’t such a swell time for dating either, especially for women. As proof, check out a timeline of dating slang from the 80 years ago to today below.

1940s: An era of cringey dessert metaphors

“Hi sugar, are you rationed?” was a common expression in the 1940s. Pretty much all '40s slang words became about World War II, whether they were about dating or not. In this case, sugar was scarce during the war, and you could only get it with government-issued ration stamps. So “are you rationed” was something men said to women equating them to inanimate bags of sucrose while essentially asking “are you taken?” The phrase was also used years later, in the '90s film, Clueless. (P.S. likening women to dessert hasn't gone away: honey, tart, cookie, cupcake, “piece of ass,” etc.)

1950s: Time to compare women to woodland creatures

This decade reflected an equally creepy dating landscape. That’s when “bird-dogging” was a popular phrase, used to describe flirting with someone else’s girlfriend. Coming from a hunting term referencing pointer dog breeds’ aptitude for tracking down fallen fowl, the expression has undeniably possessive undertones. (Bird-dogging is still in somewhat common use but has, more appropriately, evolved to refer to someone who harasses or is a total stalker in how they follow up with their dates.)

1960s: When dating starts to get “chill"

By the 1960s, our approach to dating had become a little less murder-y. This decade gave us the phrase “bummed out,” which today describes feeling blue or disappointed. Back then, it was reflective of a general expectation to downplay your emotions as much as possible. In the days of free love and “staying groovy,” feelings were often expressed in simple, shallow terms—otherwise, you could be seen as uncool or square. “Bummed out” was a way to describe feeling sad about a breakup without seeming too worked up about it.

1970s: Oh good, still comparing women to small forest animals

Ten years later, dating culture had improved (thanks in part to the second-wave feminist movement, which helped with things like reproductive rights and outlawing marital rape). But things still weren’t perfect. In the 1970s, it was common for a man to call a woman he thought was beautiful a “bunny”—a slang word that went out of style so fast I’d never even heard of it until I started my research (women are not bouncy forest creatures, after all).

1980s: Dating world, meet technology

The 1980s start to show us how technology can influence the way we talk about dating. “Making a mixtape,” was something you’d say to describe the gesture of putting together a music mix for your crush, but it could also serve as a metaphor to indicate the seriousness of one’s pursuit of another. “Making a mixtape” status reflected one’s level of emotional involvement. Cue up the Whitney Houston!

1990s: Flip phones and booty calls.

As casual dating and non-traditional, sex-based relationships continued to become more mainstream, so too did terms like “booty call” and “friends with benefits,” which arose in the mid-1990s, and “hooking up,” which came to describe non-committal sexual activity. (Although, Dictionary.com’s linguist-in-residence Jane Solomon clarifies that “hooking up” actually first entered the English lexicon in the early 1900s to signify more serious romantic bonds. Over the next century, it evolved to mean something more casual.)

2000s: Finally, things are starting to get a little gayer

One very cool shift we’ve seen since the turn of the century has been the innovation and popularization of terms used by queer communities. As mainstream society becomes more accepting of non-normative sexual identities, their slang becomes better recognized. (Slang has historically been a powerful tool for creating solidarity, and safety from persecution, for different LGBTQ+ groups.) Think of terms like “U-haul” (lesbians who fall in love and move in quickly), “100 footer” (alluding to someone so stereotypically queer-looking you could spot them from 100 feet away), and “unicorn” (a bisexual woman open to hooking up with couples).

2010s: Dating apps, Netflix, and social anxiety, oh my!

In the last 10 years, the eruption of dating apps, social media, and streaming TV have massively transformed how people couple up—and talk about it. Our slang reflects these techy and social movements. As soon as streaming TV blew up, “Netflix & chill” replaced “booty call” as the go-to euphemism for late-night hookups. “Swipe right” and “swipe left,” referencing Tinder’s user interface, have come to mean saying yes or no to things in general, even outside the context of dating. Now that social media has rendered online stalking socially acceptable, we have new slang like “sliding into someone’s DMs,” as well “left on read” (having your DM or text ignored), “cat-fishing” and “kitten-fishing” (where someone either full-on fakes or heavily doctors their online dating profile). Internet communication has also fostered lots of abbreviations: After you slide into someone’s DMs, then Netflix & chill a few times, you might want to DTR, or “define the relationship,” before they ghost you. (If that sounded like your dad trying desperately to squeeze all the hip slang he knows into one sentence, I am so sorry. But you get my point.)

Dating is no doubt an exhilarating, crazy-making, boring, messy beast. In one way or another, it always has been. The language we use to talk about it can show us how our culture is progressing (for better and for worse). I’ll never be a fan of breadcrumbing, but I sure am glad we have a word for it, making my complaints to my friends about the insufferable phenomenon much more succinct—and fun to say.

Time (and you know, technological innovation and widespread social change or whatever) will only tell what whacky dating slang comes next. Good luck out there, fam! Wishing you lots of swipe rights.

Originally Appeared on Glamour