yonks
noun (informal)

Cambridge Dictionary, Collins English Dictionary

- a very long time, usually a number of years.

- a very long time; ages. Used informally in British English

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WORD ORIGIN

Yonks is a genuine etymological puzzle — one of those rare words that walked into the English language, settled in comfortably, and refused to explain how it got there.

Its earliest confirmed appearance in print is from September 1960, in The Tank, the journal of the Royal Tank Regiment: "the bulling that has been going on for the past yonks." But anecdotal evidence places it in spoken British English at least five years earlier — at Clifton College in Bristol around 1955, and among naval officers in the same decade. Lexicographer Paul Beale noted in his 1984 revision of Eric Partridge's Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English that he first heard the word in the army in Cyprus in 1957. The OED's earliest documented evidence dates to the Daily Mirror, 1968.

As for where it came from — nobody is certain. One theory holds that yonks arrived as a kind of phonetic abbreviation of that phrase — the onk of donkey prefixed by the y of years. A more colourful theory: yonks is a clipped form of yonkey's dears — a spoonerism of donkey's years. Whether anyone actually said "yonkey's dears" out loud with a straight face remains unrecorded.

The word exists only in the plural — there is no yonk — and it appears almost exclusively in the constructions for yonks and yonks ago. 

Helga & Paul Smith

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SYNONYMS

a dog's age, a former life, a long time (while), a month of Sundays, aeons/eons, ages, ages and ages, an age, an eternity, as long as anyone can remember, centuries, donkey's years, for ages, for ages and ages, for a dog's age, for an eternity, for donkey's years, for ever and a day (many years, quite a while, the longest time/while), forever (and a day), from time immemorial, long long ago, moons, not for a long time, not in ages, seemingly forever, since Adam/Methuselah was a boy, since before records began (before the flood, since/until the cows came home, the dawn of time, the year dot, time began), time immemorial, time out of mind, until hell freezes over (kingdom come), way back when, when pigs fly, years on end, YONKS

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SMUGGLE OWAD into a conversation today, say something like:

“A few days can feel like YONKS,… especially when you really miss someone!”

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