 Thorne attended Hampton School and the University of Kent at Canterbury.Thorne’s "Dictionary of Contemporary Slang", published by Bloomsbury in February 2014, remains one of the only treatments of the subject to be based on examples of authentic speech rather than purely upon written or broadcast sources, while "Shoot the Puppy", a survey of the latest buzzwords and jargon, drew upon his inside experience of corporate life while working as a communications consultant for multinationals, NGOs and business schools.His "100 Words That Make the English", published by Abacus in April 2011, consists of essays on one hundred key words that are most emblematic of English identity in the 20th and 21st centuries.