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This is the Keep Your English Up-To-date Podcast from BBC Learning English.com.

In this week's program, John Aetto explains the origin, meaning and use of the word minging.

Minging. There's no getting away from it.

We human beings seem to be at our most inventive

when we're thinking up words to insult each other with.

A select list of adjectives we've applied over the past hundred years to people or things we find disgusting would include scroungy, scanky, manky, icky, grotty, grungy, poxy, scuzzi, oncus, that's Australian, yucky, snotty, septic, gross, I could go on.

One recent addition to this armory of scorn is especially versatile and given its history, fairly

pungent.

It's minging. That curry he cooked up for us last night was really minging. We have Scotland to thank

for it. In Scottish English, Ming is an old word for a bad smell, so originally

minging meant smelly as it still can. But of course calling someone smelly is a perfect way of insulting

them and around the year 2000 British teenagers started using it more broadly to mean disgusting. It can also mean ugly or unattractive.

And in an interesting development similar to stinking you can use it to say someone is drunk.

He'd only had two pints and he was minging.

And along with minging, there's minger.

Now calling someone a minger is a really bad insult.

It often implies ugly person.

If you said someone's girlfriend was a minger,

...