Stonking: Slang adjective, originally British or Australian, meaning excellent, powerful, impressive, or impressively large.
World Wide Words ("international English from a British viewpoint") calls stonking "a word of vague positive emphasis" with two possible origins: Australia (where stonkered means "drunk") and Britain (where a stonker is "something which is large or impressive of its kind"). The original (19th century) context appears to be the game of marbles, in which a stonk was the marble or the stake put up in a game. During World War II, British military slang appropriated stonk as a noun meaning "intense artillery bombardment" or a verb meaning "to bombard."
The ultimate etymology, suggests the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, may be onomatopoeic, from the sound of one marble hitting another. The word does not appear to be related to stink.
Stonking (also seen as stonkin' or stonkin) crops up regularly in informal fashion writing, as in this bit of advice about wearing sweater dresses, published in the Guardian in October 2006: "Wear with opaque tights and stonking high heels." (The column also suggests another way to accessorize the sweater dress: "wellies, golden retriever, clandestine lover and a bag of Liquorice Allsorts.")
More often than not 'stonking' is made even more expressive by being succeeded by a word such as 'great' -- as in 'stonking-great heels'. In this context the word 'stonking' is always emphasised.
I hear it used commonly as a noun, as in 'that's a stonker!' ...though, as it can be applied to anything big, first the speaker needs to identify to his audience to what he's referring.
Posted by: John Russell | July 01, 2008 at 04:07 AM
Love this word! I only encountered it for the first time about a year ago and have been trying to use it more frequently ever since.
Posted by: Sarah, etc. | July 01, 2008 at 06:39 AM
A note of caution on usage in England. A man using the phrase: 'I've got a stonker' would mean only one thing and, yes, it's Viagra-related.
Posted by: Martin Bishop | July 07, 2008 at 02:31 PM
I was directed here when I googled "stonking," which I had just run across in the album title "Talcum Soul: 26 Stonking Northern Soul Greats," which now makes perfect sense. By the way, for those of you on one side of the Atlantic or the other, "Northern Soul" in England is roughly equivalent to America's "Beach Music" (popular on the East Coast), which in turn has nothing to do with the Beach Boys and Surf Music (on the West Coast). Now there's another quirk of the English language...
Posted by: The Warped Vinyl Junkie | July 26, 2008 at 10:00 AM
I hear this alot
" look at shieldz's stonking sausage"
Posted by: shieldz | August 11, 2008 at 11:22 AM