Yonks

Part of speech: noun

Pronunciation: /jɒŋks/

Definitions

1. A very long time, often used to express that something happened ages ago or took a long duration
2. An informal term referring to a lengthy period in the past or since a particular event
3. A colloquial expression meaning an extended amount of time, typically suggesting it feels like ages have passed

Etymology: One of the earliest printed sightings of this cheerful bit of British slang turns up not in a novel or a newspaper but in The Tank, the journal of the Royal Tank Regiment, in September 1960. People later remembered saying it before then, which is how slang usually works: it lives in mouths for a while before anyone bothers to write it down. Wherever it began, it had gone mainstream within a decade. On 27 August 1968 the Daily Mirror printed the line "I haven't heard from you for yonks," and that fixed phrase, "for" plus a long stretch of time, is still where the word is most at home across Britain and the Commonwealth. Its origin is unknown, and the leading suspect is a donkey. "Donkey's years," meaning a very long time, was in British use by 1916. It began as a pun: a donkey's ears are famously long, and "ears" sounds like "years," so a wait as long as donkey's ears became donkey's years. The theory holds that speakers squeezed and reshaped "donkey's" into the snappier "yonks," perhaps with help from the "y" of "years." On first hearing this sounds faintly ridiculous. But slang often grows by exactly this kind of clipping and garbling, so it cannot be dismissed. The rival explanation is tidier: that the word is assembled from "years, months and weeks," taking a "y," an "on," and a "ks." It is neat, but suspiciously so. Explanations that build a word from the initials or pieces of a phrase are very often invented after the fact, and nothing in the early record shows anyone hearing yonks as a compressed list of time units.

Synonyms: ages, eons, aeons, donkey's years

Antonyms: moment, instant, jiffy, flash