Pompey slang: 5 words and names you didn't know
From Spice Island to the Pompey Chimes and a word for a fool that came from Romani, a short guide to Portsmouth's own vocabulary.
Pompey slang includes the Pompey Chimes (the Guildhall's five bells, which inspired the football chant), Spice Island (Portsmouth Point's nickname, from its seedy reputation) and dinlo (a fool, from Romani dinolo). The Pompey name itself is older than the football club, founded in 1898.
Pompey slang is the everyday vocabulary and nicknames of Portsmouth, and some of it is older than you would guess. The best known is the Pompey Chimes: the five bells of Portsmouth Guildhall, also called the Town Hall, are nicknamed that because they inspired the football chant of the same name. Here are the words and names behind the city's voice.
The Pompey Chimes
According to Wikipedia's Portsmouth Guildhall page, the Guildhall's five bells are nicknamed the Pompey Chimes. The Portsmouth F.C. page adds that the football chant was originally called The Town Hall Chimes. So the name travelled from the building to the terraces, which is a nice example of a place lending its sound to a crowd.
Why the bells fell silent
The Pompey Chimes stopped in 2003. Wikipedia says the tower needed restoration because of the corrosive effect of sea salt in the air. Salt air is part of living beside a harbour, and here it silenced a landmark. The restoration was finished in time for the Queen's visit in 2009.
Spice Island
Portsmouth Point, the old harbour-mouth quarter, is nicknamed Spice Island. Wikipedia says the name comes from its seedy reputation as the "Spice of Life". This is a single-source claim: we found it on Wikipedia and no second page confirmed it, so it is worth treating as the commonly given explanation rather than a settled fact. Nobody is talking about actual spices.
Dinlo
Dinlo is slang for a fool. Wiktionary describes it as Southern English slang, especially used in Portsmouth, and says it comes from the Romani word dinolo. It cites Tony Thorne's Dictionary of Contemporary Slang (fourth edition, 2014). A Portsmouth News list of words only locals know also features it, though we could only see that page as a search snippet, so we treat it as supporting rather than primary. If someone calls you a dinlo, you now know where the word came from, and you can decide how offended to be.
An older name than the club
The nickname Pompey itself is older than the football club. Wikipedia says an army side, Royal Artillery (Portsmouth) F.C., was already nicknamed Pompey before Portsmouth F.C. was founded in 1898. Be careful with dates here, because sources differ. Green's Dictionary of Slang gives the earliest clear use for the town as 1898, and the Oxford English Dictionary is reported to date the town nickname to 1899. We have kept to Wikipedia's wording and treat this as one source.
Where the nickname came from is a separate and much-argued question. Green's Dictionary of Slang says the etymology is unknown, and a linguists' mailing list notes about a dozen competing ideas with none settled. That story gets its own page, so we leave the theories there.
Words we left out
Plenty of other Pompeyspeak, including the word mush for a mate, shows up on lists, but we could not find a solid origin for it, so we have not made any claim. The same goes for "dodge Pompey", a naval phrase first printed in 1836, whose link to the name is unresolved. Folk tales about the nickname, involving Shakespeare or drunken sailors, are anecdotes, not evidence.
Hearing it for yourself
The Guildhall is Portsmouth's Town Hall. We have not checked opening times or events there, so check before you go.
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