5 great words from Singapore English (now in the OED)
As an OED editor working mostly on words coming from world varieties of English, I am always fascinated by the research that goes into every dictionary entry, and what it tells me about the culture and history of English-speaking communities in different parts of the globe. Every once in a while, I also get the chance to take my work beyond the OED’s offices in Oxford and right to the very places where World Englishes are spoken, experiencing words in their natural environment and gaining greater insight into their origin and use.
I had one such opportunity in a recent visit to Asia. My first stop was Singapore, that tiny city-state in Southeast Asia known for its clean streets, modern high-rises, and of course, its distinctive variety of English. Some words unique to Singapore have recently been included in the OED—here are just a few of them, along with some interesting stories behind their journey into the pages of the dictionary.
1. ang moh
A light-skinned person, especially of Western origin or descent; a Caucasian.
One of the best things I did during my stay in Singapore was visit the National Library, which was then holding an exhibition of the highlights of its collection. I spent several hours looking at books, newspapers, magazines, documents, letters, and photographs that offered a revealing glimpse into Singapore’s colourful history as a meeting point of many cultures. The artefacts in the exhibition are examples of the textual evidence that OED lexicographers use in their daily work, and thanks to the efforts of institutions such as the National Library in digitizing these materials and putting them on the Internet, this evidence is becoming more easily accessible to us.
Online access to digitized issues of the Singapore Free Press via the National Library’s NewspaperSG database was what enabled me to trace the word ang moh all the way back to the end of the 19th century:
1899 Singapore Free Press 26 Jan. 3/1 Permit thy humble servant to approach thee by the way of my friend Tan Tan Tiam, who knoweth the Ang Moh’s speech, and kindly consenteth to write to him.
This early quotation clearly proves that the Hokkien borrowing ang moh has been used in Singapore English for longer than people would think, and shows how local digitization initiatives help the OED in creating historically accurate entries for World English words.
Slow in understanding; unaware, ignorant, confused.
I try not to play favourites with words, but I must admit that I particularly enjoy working on creative constructions that evoke a vivid image of what it is trying to convey. One such word is the Singapore English blur. Unlike most World English words, blur is not a borrowing from an indigenous language but rather a clever adaptation of an existing English word. Blur is used in general English as either a noun or a verb, but in Singapore English, it is used as an adjective. It is also often combined with sotong, a loanword from Malay meaning squid, to form the expression blur as sotong, an imaginative simile that likens a stupid person to a squid lost in a cloud of its own black ink. The OED’s earliest quotation for blur was taken from a 1977 issue of the Straits Times, Singapore’s most widely read English-language newspaper:
1977 Straits Times (Singapore) 19 Aug. 9/3 He is blur-blur.
This quotation also illustrates Singaporean speakers’ fondness for reduplication, or repeating words in order to intensify or give prominence to a description.
3. hawker centre
A food market at which individual vendors sell cooked food from small stalls, with a shared seating area for customers.
No trip to Singapore can be complete without a meal at a hawker centre, and so within hours of getting off the plane, I found myself right in the middle of its most beautiful and historic one, Lau Pa Sat. Under the intricate filigree arches of this cast-iron structure, designed and built in the 19th century by Scottish engineers and shipped to the island all the way from Glasgow, is a dizzying array of stalls selling everything from typical local fare such as chicken rice and kaya toast to intriguingly named dishes like pig’s organ soup (still kicking myself for not having tried that one). In many ways, this iconic hawker centre is like the English language—something originally British that was brought to Singapore during the colonial era, then reshaped, rebuilt, and repurposed over the years to suit the changing needs of Singaporeans.
The expression hawker centre itself is an interesting recent development in the history of hawker, a word of Germanic origin first attested in English in the early 1500s. The word refers to a vendor who goes from place to place to sell goods, and indeed, Singapore’s hawker food culture began with itinerant street-food sellers. The OED’s first quotation for hawker centre is from the 1960s:
1966 Straits Times (Singapore) 14 Oct. 18/1 Separate tenders are invited for any one or all of the following… Erection & Completion of..1 Block of 2-Storey Hawker Centre (162 Stalls).
This coincides with the period of rapid urbanization in Singapore that saw the construction of open-air food complexes with permanent stalls as a more hygienic alternative to travelling food carts. The use of hawker as a term for these food vendors has endured, even if their mobility has not.
Housing and Development Board; used chiefly with reference to public housing estates built and managed by the Singapore government.
Singapore is a country that loves its initialisms and acronyms. I learned early on that sadly, those ubiquitous signs that said PIE led to no desserts but to the Pan-Island Expressway, and I soon got used to paying with NETS to use the MRT to go from MBS to the CBD.
One initialism is of special significance to Singaporeans, as it refers to a place called home by a large proportion of them—HDB. These three letters stand for Housing and Development Board, but they are now more typically used in connection with the public housing estates that this government body builds and manages, the high-rise apartment blocks that constitute the vertical communities of modern Singapore. The Board was established in 1960, and a year later, we see the first use of HDB, as recorded by the OED:
1961 Straits Times (Singapore) 9 Aug. 4/2 He was accompanied by Mr. Teh Cheang Wan, chief architect of the H.D.B.
As a word, HDB is highly productive, giving rise to a wide variety of compounds: HDB flat, HDB apartment, HDB home, HDB resident, HDB neighbours—the list goes on.
Oh, and BTW: NETS is Network for Electronic Transfers, MRT is the Mass Rapid Transit, MBS is Marina Bay Sands, and CBD is the Central Business District. KIV—keep all this in view if you’re considering a trip to Singapore.
Interjection: expressing admiration or approval. Adjective: delicious, superb; admirable, enjoyable, excellent.
Malay, as one of Singapore’s major languages, is an important source of loanwords for Singapore English. One particularly productive Malay borrowing that has acquired multiple uses and meanings in everyday Singapore speech is shiok. It comes from the Malay adjective syok, meaning pleasing or attractive, a word whose origins can be traced to Persian and ultimately, Arabic.
In Singapore English, shiok is used as an exclamation expressing appreciation or approbation, just like ‘cool!’ and ‘great!’ It is also an adjective that is frequently associated with delicious food, though it can also be used to describe anything that causes pleasure or inspires admiration. According to evidence uncovered by the OED, all three meanings of the word surfaced in written Singapore English around the end of the 1970s:
1977 New Nation (Singapore) 26 May 19/2 Fantas. Ooh-la-la. Phew-whew. Wowie. Shiok. Jazzy, man. Beaut.
1978 Straits Times (Singapore) 8 July 16/1 (advt.) Help preserve the essence of ‘shiok’ cooking!
1980 Sunday Times (Singapore) 5 Oct. 10/6 Singlish sounds them shiok at times, wouldn’t you agree?
This versatile word is so emblematic of the nation’s culture that last year, it was chosen as one of the 50 icons of Singapore, and thus regarded as quintessentially Singaporean as the Merlion. And it is also a word I can use to describe my brief stay in Singapore, as well as the country’s uniquely inventive, richly expressive additions to the English language.