I left the UK in 2002. I’ve lived in Singapore ever since. And somewhere along the way, I stopped speaking the same English as the people I grew up with.
Not because I picked up Singlish (though I did, a bit). But because English itself kept moving in two directions at once, and I was standing still in the middle.
I’ve been thinking about this through three lists. Together, they tell a story about language, colonial history, and what happens when a rupture goes unnoticed for decades.
List One: Words Singapore Kept. The UK Didn’t.
These are the fossil words. Singapore preserved them from the colonial era like insects in amber. They are perfectly correct English, just English from roughly 150 years ago. In the UK, they survive mostly in formal writing or among older speakers. In everyday casual British conversation, they sound conspicuously old-fashioned. A Singaporean uses them without a second thought.
Spectacles Still used in the UK: you’ll find it on NHS forms, in optician signage, in the speech of older Britons. But among younger speakers in casual conversation, “glasses” has largely taken over. In Singapore, “spectacles” is the unmarked default across all ages. The generational gap in the UK is a regional survival; the generational consistency in Singapore is something else.
Menses Used matter-of-factly in Singapore schools and clinics. Google Ngram shows this word peaked in the late 1800s. Elsewhere in the English-speaking world, you just say “period.”
Alight “Please alight from the train.” Completely natural here. In the UK, you get off the train. “Alight” survives in station announcements, and even then it reads as deliberately elevated register, not neutral instruction.
Thrice Meaning three times. It survives in British literary prose and formal contexts, but in casual speech it sounds archaic. Anecdotally, British expats in Singapore report a beat of confusion on first hearing it used conversationally. In everyday UK speech, you say “three times.”
Seldom Unremarkable in Singapore. In everyday British conversation, it carries a faintly literary flavour, not wrong, but noticeably chosen.
Wee hours Still all over Singapore’s local news. In the UK, journalists say “early hours.” The wee hours feel distinctly dated.
Six words. That’s it. I started with a longer list and kept applying the strict test. Most candidates failed. The shortness is actually the point.
If Singapore had truly preserved colonial English wholesale, you’d expect dozens of examples. The fact that only six words make a defensible case tells you something more specific: what survived wasn’t random. These words were institutionally embedded: in transport announcements, medical practice, school curricula, and newsrooms. They had structural anchors. The rest drifted away just as it did in the UK.
List Two: Words the UK Uses. Singapore Doesn’t.
Here’s the flip side. After Singapore’s independence in 1965, British English kept evolving: new slang, new registers, new ways of expressing old feelings. Singapore didn’t get the update.
These are words a British person uses without thinking, that would sound foreign, or just wrong, to most Singaporeans.
Cross (angry) “I’m rather cross about this.” Nobody in Singapore says cross for angry. Not once.
Gutted (devastated) “I’m absolutely gutted.” Post-independence British slang. Never landed here.
Knackered (exhausted) Constant in the UK. Singapore uses shag, or just “very tired.”
Fancy (verb) “Do you fancy a coffee?” or “I fancy him.” These sentence constructions don’t exist in Singapore English. Here, you don’t fancy things. You want them.
Chuffed (pleased) “I’m well chuffed.” No Singapore equivalent in English. You’d say “very happy”, or reach for Singlish.
Peckish (slightly hungry) “I’m feeling a bit peckish.” Singaporeans are either hungry or not. There is no peckish.
Notice the pattern, and it holds more consistently than List One. Every word here describes a feeling or a physical state. The UK built a rich informal vocabulary for how the body and heart feel. Singapore did too. More on that in a moment.
List Three: Words I Don’t Even Know. (Probably.)
This one is where the essay falls apart a little. And that’s worth saying out loud.
I left the UK in 2002. It is now 2026. My assumption was that 24 years of British linguistic drift would have produced a clean list of words I’d never encountered, proof of how far I’d drifted from the source.
It didn’t work out that way.
Every strong candidate I found (ghosting, gaslighting, triggered, rizz, mid, slay) I already knew. Not because I kept up with British culture, but because the internet made the question irrelevant. Slang that would once have taken a decade to travel from London streets to Singapore living rooms now takes about forty-eight hours.
Youth slang compounds the problem. Peng, mandem, wasteman: these are real, they’re everywhere in UK teenage speech, but they’re not general adult vocabulary. A 50-year-old in Birmingham wouldn’t use them conversationally either. I can’t claim they’re words I don’t know when half of Britain doesn’t use them.
So List Three doesn’t exist. And that absence tells you something important, though it also raises an obvious question.
Why the Internet Explains List Three But Not Lists One and Two
If global connectivity flattens linguistic difference, why didn’t it flatten Lists One and Two as well? Why haven’t gutted and chuffed landed in Singapore? Why does the UK still use spectacles and thrice at all?
The answer is timing.
The fossil words in List One set before the internet existed. They became embedded in Singapore’s institutions: its transport system, its education policy, its medical and civil service bureaucracies, during the colonial period and immediately after independence. Once a word is load-bearing in an institution, it doesn’t erode the way casual vocabulary does. Nobody is going to redesign MRT signage because British teenagers stopped saying “alight.”
The gap in List Two persisted for the same structural reason, from the other direction. The British slang that Singapore never received evolved in the decades after 1965, in informal registers: pubs, tabloids, television, playgrounds, with no institutional pipeline into Singapore. By the time the internet arrived, it could transmit the words, but not the felt sense that makes you reach for them naturally. You can know what gutted means without it ever becoming the word you use when you’re devastated.
List Three is different. It developed entirely in the internet era, in the same informal registers as British slang, but globally. There was no pre-internet institutional gap to preserve. The drift that should have produced List Three got flattened in real time.
The internet arrived too late to dissolve Lists One and Two, and too early to let List Three form.
Which means Lists One and Two may be among the last of their kind.
What All Three Lists Are Really Saying
Three lists. One story.
They are all shadows of the same rupture: Singapore’s separation from the British linguistic orbit, which happened gradually from the 1940s through 1965, and which I personally re-enacted when I left in 2002.
List One shows what was institutionally alive at the moment of colonial separation and got preserved here in amber.
List Two shows what the UK grew afterwards, informally and culturally, that never crossed over.
List Three shows how the internet erased the very drift it should have documented, but only for language young enough to have been born online.
But here’s the thing that took me longest to see. The gap that List Two describes didn’t stay empty. Singapore didn’t develop a rich informal vocabulary in English. It developed one in Singlish instead.
And Singlish is precise in ways that formal English never is.
Sian. Bored, fed up, mentally done. Not physically tired; that’s different. The specific feeling of being over something before it’s even finished.
Shiok. Deep sensory pleasure. The satisfaction of food that’s exactly right, a shower after a long day, anything that hits the way it’s supposed to hit. “Nice” doesn’t come close.
Jialat. The situation is bad. Not your feelings about it, the situation itself. Dire, serious, possibly unrecoverable. You say it when you’ve just realised the scale of a problem.
Blur. Confused, slow to catch on, not quite tracking. Said with affection as often as frustration. “Blur like sotong” if you want the full version.
Bojio. You didn’t invite me. A single word that carries the entire social weight of mild betrayal, feigned hurt, and gentle accusation. No English equivalent exists.
Paiseh. Embarrassed, awkward, a little ashamed, but specifically the social kind. The feeling of having inconvenienced someone, or been caught out, or asked for something you shouldn’t have needed to ask for.
None of these map cleanly onto the British slang Singapore never received. They’re not translations. They’re solutions to different problems, shaped by different social textures.
Peckish never made it through customs.
Which word surprised you most? Drop it in the comments.
