Where the name came from
A short account, told the way it was told to us.
Some names are chosen; this one was overheard. In the spring of 2022, at a record fair in a church hall in Deptford, a dealer had a cardboard sign propped against a crate of 2LPs: SKENG PRICES, ALL WEEKEND. Nobody asked what it meant, because everybody in the room already knew. The prices had been cut.
Knife is the plain translation. Skeng is London slang for a blade, and the dealer used it the way a butcher uses a cleaver in the window: a promise that something had been taken to the bone. His copy of Untrue on 2LP was £30 against a going rate near £50. That is the kind of gap this index now flags every day, in vinyl, sealed Pokémon TCG, second-hand hi-fi and limited-edition prints.
Every spreadsheet needs a file name, and the one that became this index was called skeng from that afternoon on. It held a few hundred rows: what sealed booster boxes, used turntables and original pressings had actually sold for on UK marketplaces, and what sellers were asking. The column that mattered was the difference between the two.
Nought came later. A spreadsheet is not a domain, and skeng on its own was taken in every form that mattered. Putting a zero in front did three things. It kept the word, it sorted the file to the top of every folder, and it finished the joke: a knife and a zero, prices cut to nothing, or as near to nothing as a listing ever gets.
Good names survive contact with strangers. Say 0skeng out loud and people hear oh-skeng, which is fine. Type it and the zero does its job. Either way the purpose is in the name: a UK price index for collectibles and hi-fi, built to find the listings where somebody has already taken the knife to the price.