Which word came first: “cool” or “rad” ?
Probably “cool”. I heard that as a kid, but didn’t hear “rad” until my late teens, early twenties.
According to Merriam Webster’s Collegiate, the slang form of cool dates from 1951 and rad from 1982. These are the dates that they first appeared in print and were used in the spoken form earlier.
Haj
Assuming you mean the slang terms -
cool is much older. The OED online dates rad to 1982:
but cool to 1947-8 in the sense of cool jazz and the general sense of hipness and approval associated with it:
As I see on preview haj says, like most dictionary datings, these are likely to be later than the word first appeared in slang speech. OED wins this round, though.
“Cool” probably goes back much farther than that. Cited in 1933 in Black English,
That’s just one of two quotes from the 1930’s. Also, a 1944 “Service Slang” list where “cool”=“good.”
Courtesy of Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang.
Isn’t rad just a shortened form of the 70’s slang term: radical ?