First recorded in 1645–55; originally the kind of speech often heard at Billingsgate, a London fish market at the gate of the same name
Billingsgate is rude, abusive language. If a political debate is becoming nasty and insulting, it's good to have a moderator who will demand an end to the billingsgate. The British term billingsgate is less familiar in the U.S. — but it's a great way to refer to a particularly coarse form of verbal abuse. It comes from London's Billingsgate Fish Market, a 17th-century open-air market where ill-mannered fishmongers hollered raucously, haggling over prices using rude and vulgar language. The word can be used for any kind of foul-mouthed vituperation: "No arguing about sports rivalries at my birthday party! It always turns into pure billingsgate!"
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Last week they felt no shame in engaging in an exchange of diplomatic billingsgate.
From Time Magazine Archive
Gleason merely settles in for an extended Honeymooners skit, swinging on the billingsgate with his wife and rolling fried-egg eyes skyward at every silence.
From Time Magazine Archive
The best Baedeker of billingsgate and other U.S. lingua frank since Mencken.
From Time Magazine Archive
There is Merry Bell, Washington's hostess with the mostest billingsgate on the tip of her Bryn Mawr tongue.
From Time Magazine Archive
It reads now like very dreary and very vulgar billingsgate.
From James Fenimore Cooper American Men of Letters by Lounsbury, Thomas Raynesford
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
