Dinlo (n)

Means: An idiot

Usage: “You can tell Callum anything and he’ll believe it, he’s a right dinlo.”

Some linguists are claiming that, far from dying out, regional dialects - and that includes local slang terms - are being helped by SMS texting, chatting and tweeting on social media sites, as well as old-fashioned word of mouth, to spread further across the UK. A probable example of this is yet another term for a complete dope, or dupe (in practice nearly always male) which originated in Romany as dinilo and has long been in use from the New Forest, via Portsmouth’s ‘Pompey - slang’ to East Anglia. Dinlo(w) is the usual form, although “dinler”, “dindler” and “dingle” have also been recorded. Yoof elsewhere have now added these to their already rich lexicon of insults, sometimes abbreviating to “dinny” or just “din”.