A slang dictionary is a reference book A reference work is a compendium of information, usually of a specific type, compiled in a book for ease of reference. That is, the information is intended to be quickly found when needed. Reference works are usually referred to for particular pieces of information, rather than read cover to cover. The writing style used in these works is containing an alphabetical Collation is the assembly of written information into a standard order. One common type of collation is called alphabetisation, though collation is not limited to ordering letters of the alphabet. Collating lists of words or names into alphabetical order is the basis of most office filing systems, library catalogs and reference books list of slang Slang is the use of highly informal words and expressions that are not considered standard in the speaker's dialect or language, vernacular Vernacular refers to the native language of a country or a locality. In general linguistics, it is used to describe local languages as opposed to lingua francas, official standards or global languages. It is sometimes applied to nonstandard dialects of a global language. For instance, in Western Europe up until the 17th century, most scholarly vocabulary A person's vocabulary is the set of words they are familiar with in a language. A vocabulary usually grows and evolves with age, and serves as a useful and fundamental tool for communication and acquiring knowledge not generally acceptable in formal usage, usually including information given for each word, usually including meaning, pronunciation, and etymology For languages with a long written history, etymologists make use of texts in these languages, and texts about the languages, to gather knowledge about how words were used at earlier stages, and when they entered the languages in question. Etymologists also apply the methods of comparative linguistics to reconstruct information about languages that. It can provide definitions on a range of slang from more mundane terms (like "rain check" or "bob and weave") to obscure sexual practices. Such works also can include words and phrases arising from different dialects The term dialect is used in two distinct ways, even by scholars of language. One usage refers to a variety of a language that is characteristic of a particular group of the language's speakers. The term is applied most often to regional speech patterns, but a dialect may also be defined by other factors, such as social class. A dialect that is and argots Argot is a secret language used by various groups—including, but not limited to, thieves and other criminals—to prevent outsiders from understanding their conversations. The term argot is also used to refer to the informal specialized vocabulary from a particular field of study, hobby, job, sport, etc.[citation needed], which may or may not have passed into more common usage. They can also track the changing meaning of the terms over time and space, as they migrate and mutate. This makes them of interest to a variety of people, from oral historians, to etymologists For languages with a long written history, etymologists make use of texts in these languages, and texts about the languages, to gather knowledge about how words were used at earlier stages, and when they entered the languages in question. Etymologists also apply the methods of comparative linguistics to reconstruct information about languages that, to the casual browser.

English-language slang lexicography falls into three periods. The 'canting' or criminal slang dictionaries of the 16th to 18th centuries, the 'vulgar tongue' works of the late 18th to mid-19th, and the 'modern' productions that have appeared since.

I. Canting

The collection of 'cant', properly the jargon of the mendicant criminal beggars of Tudor and Stuart England, echoes the near-contemporary 'beggar-books' of Europe: designed to alert the law-abiding public to the existence of such beggars - 'the canting crew' - listing their occupational types and offering a small glossary of their language. The word cant comes from Latin cantare, to sing, and refers to the sing-song plaints of contemporary beggars. The first such work was Robert Copland's Hye Way to the Spyttell Hous (c.1535). In the form of averse dialogue between Copland, a printer who once worked with William Caxton, and the Porter of the Spytell House (a charity hospital assumed to be Bart's in London), Copland notes and the Porter describes the various categories of beggars and thieves, as well as their tricks and frauds. There is no glossary as such, but some 36 terms are defined in the text.

Two similar and expanded works followed. In 1561 John Awdeley, another printer, published The Fraternitye of Vacabondes. The brief (nine-page) work, offering 48 headwords, falls into three parts: the first deals with rural villains, the second with their urban cousins and the third is Awdeley's list of 'the xxv. Orders of Knaues, otherwyse called a Quartern of Knaues'.

The most influential 16th-century work appears c.1566: Thomas Harman's Caveat for Common Cursetours. Harman, a magistrate, produced a consciously didactic work, designed to introduce the reader to 'the leud lousey language of these lewtering [loitering] luskes [idlers] and lasy lorrels [blackguards] where with they bye and sell the common people as they pas through the country. Whych language they terme Peddelars Frenche.' There are 24 small essays, each dealing with a different rank of villain, plus a list of some 114 terms. These are very briefly defined, usually with a single synonym. The work concludes with a list of contemporary beggars, e.g. 'Harry Smyth, he driueleth when he speaketh', and a contrived dialogue written in cant and translated into English.

Harman's vocabulary would remain the core of several subsequent glossaries, with a succession of 'rogue pamphlets' appearing over the next two centuries. Among these are The Bellman of London and Lanthorne and Candle Light (both 1608) by the playwright Thomas Dekker, who also included much canting vocabulary in his 1611 play, The Roaring Girle, co-written with Thomas Middleton; and Martin Mark-all, beadle of Bridewell by Samuel Rowlands (or Rid), in 1610. Others include Richard Head's The Canting Academy, or the Devil's Cabinet opened (1673) and John Shirley's Triumph of Wit (1688). Another pair of early 17th-century playwrights, Beaumont and Fletcher, were equally keen to parade their knowledge of cant in their play Beggar's Bush (1622). In 1688 Thomas Shadwell's play Squire of Alasatia offered audiences a guide to the language it celebrated.

While Harman can be seen as a sociological researcher, and Dekker (at least in his prose works) and his peers as informative reformers, the 'coney-catching' pamphlets of playwright Robert Greene are nakedly sensational. The first such pamphlet, A Notable Discouery oi Coosnage [cozenage, or trickery] Now daily practised by sundry lewd persons called Connie-Catchers [confidence tricksters] and Cross-biters [swindlers] appeared in 1591. Five sequels followed by 1592. Greene gleefully peddles his down-market sensationalism, larded with new canting terms - the vocabularies of the various branches of confidence trickery - and supposedly first-hand anecdote, but carefully quarantined with pious horror. In one pamphlet, The Defence of Conny Catching by 'Cuthbert Conny-catcher', he even attacks himself.

With A New Dictionary of the Terms ancient and modern of the Canting Crew, by the anonymous B.E., Gent.[leman] (c. 1698), there emerges the first major development in slang lexicography since Harman. It is the first ever stand-alone 'slang dictionary', rather than an appended glossary. The title emphasizes canting but B.E.'s vocabulary, some 4000 words, adds general slang, colloquialisms, and a variety of non-criminal jargons to the core material. There are other innovations: for some entries, however few, he offers citations and etymologies; there are a number of cross-references and he adopts usage labels. Like Harman, B.E. would be 'honoured' by his plagiarists. These include Captain Alexander Smith, whose 'Thieves' New Canting Dictionary', available in his History of the Lives and Robberies of the Most Notorious Highwaymen (1719), is unashamedly derivative. Similarly the anonymously written New Canting Dictionary (1725) is no more than an adaptation. The glossary attached to the oft-reprinted Life of the self-styled gypsy king Bampfylde Moore Carew (1750 et seq.) is similarly sourced. And it is B.E. (embellished by the New Canting Dictionary which it follows almost word-for-word) whose word-list provides the basis of the 'Collection of Canting Words' included in Bailey's Universal Etymological English Dictionary, an otherwise standard English dictionary published in 1737.

II. Vulgar tongue

The 18th century did not merely produce adaptations of B.E. Among other works, all offering glossaries, are Hell Upon Earth (1703), The Memoirs of the right villainous John Hall (1708), The Amorous Gallant's Tongue, by 'G.L.' (1710 et seq.), The Regulator (1718) by Claude Hitchin, Daniel Defoe's Street Robberies Considered (1 728), James Dalton's Genuine Narrative of Street-Robberies Considered (1728), the confessional Discoveries of John Poulter (1753), and George Parker's View of Society in High and Low Life (1781) and Life's Painter of Variegated Characters (1789). All these trade upon the 'glamour' of criminality and the author's retailing to the innocent but interested consumer of its specialist language, a phenomenon that has by no means vanished in modern use, whether on the printed page or on screen.

In 1785 the next way-station in slang collection arrives: The Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, by the antiquary and former militia officer Captain Francis Grose, who was both a friend of Robert Burns and an acquaintance of Samuel Johnson. A second, substantially augmented edition appeared in 1788, followed by a third in 1796. The pirated Lexicon Balatronicum ('by a member of the Whip Club, assisted by hell-Fire Dick') was effectively the fourth in 1811, and the fifth was edited by the boxing journalist Pierce Egan in 1823. In his 4000 headwords Grose incorporates his main predecessors, but expands much further into general slang, his 'vulgar tongue'. Grose now set the pattern for the next century. One other dictionary appeared in 1823, Slang, A Dictionary of the Turf, the Ring, the Chase, the Pit, of Bon-Ton, and the Varieties of Life. Its author was 'Jon Bee' (properly John Badcock), who had already challenged Egan's best-selling chronicle of Life in London (1821), in which appear the originals of every subsequent 'Tom and Jerry' (to wit 'Corinthian Tom', the London sophisticate, and his rural friend, up to see the urban sights, Jerry Hawthorn) with his own hugely derivative Real Life in London (1821). Badcock's book is far more verbose than Egan's, but lexicographically it is more curiosity than linguistic tool.

III. Modernity

Four more noteworthy dictionaries appear by 1900. The first, in 1857, is the brief Vulgar Tongue by 'Ducange Anglicus'. It comprises a pair of glossaries, the first collected by the author, the second from a report presented to the Government in 1839. In addition there is 'The Leary Man', a flash song, and a tailor's handbill written in slang, with a translation into standard English on the reverse. It is the first to offer rhyming slang, for all that this style of slanging, even today seen by many as the essence of the whole slang vocabulary, had actually emerged around 1815.

In 1859 appeared the first of the six editions (variously expanded) of John Camden Hotten's Modern Slang, Cant and Vulgar Words, latterly The Slang Dictionary. Hotten was variously a bookseller/publisher, a pirate of such American 'stars' as Mark Twain, and a cultivator of his 'flower garden', books of flagellant pornography. The dictionary has lists of rhyming slang and of backslang, both prefaced by a brief history and discussion. There is, for the first time, a 'Bibliography of Slang and Cant,' listing some 120 titles, plus his own critical comments on each. Hotten stresses that this is above all a dictionary of 'modern Slang - a list of colloquial words and phrases in present use - whether of ancient or modem formation'. He omits obsolete terms and has opted, unlike Grose, to exclude 'filthy and obscene words' although he acknowledges their popularity in street-talk. He touches on jargon, without describing it as such, and thus deals with the terminology of the beau monde, politics, the army and navy, the church, the law, literature and the theatre. He has a list of slang terms for money, one of oaths, one for drunkenness and deals with the language of shopkeepers and workmen.

Hotten was the slang dictionary until 1890 (and Chatto & Windus, who bought up his list on his death, continued to publish the book until World War I). His pre-eminence was somewhat breached in 1889 by The Dictionary of Slang, Jargon and Cant by Albert Barrere and C.G. Leland. But this two-volume work was barely published when it was displaced by the seven volumes of John Farmer and W.E. Henley's Slang and Its Analogues (1890-1904, revised edition of vol. 1 only, 1909). Farmer, who combined slang researches with writings on spiritualism, and Henley, then one of Britain's leading poets, took slang lexicography into a new dimension. The book adopted the same 'historical' method as the contemporaneous New English Dictionary (subsequently renamed as The Oxford English Dictionary). All but a few headwords come with a number of citations, some 100,000 in all, to illustrate usage and nuance. These quotes take in 'the whole period of English literature from the earliest down to the present time' and are arranged as far as possible from 'first use' to current use. As well as citations, there are, wherever possible, foreign synonyms for the slang words. English synonymy is also paramount: those listed at monosyllable (i.e. the vagina), for instance, run to 13 columns, while those at greens (i.e. sexual intercourse) run to seven. There are errors, typically in the citations, where dates and even the quotes themselves may have fallen foul of the sheer volume of the undertaking (and the fact that a succession of printers, prudishly discomfited by the content, abruptly refused to continue with the work), but the overall achievement of Farmer and Henley far outweighs such slips.

In recent years, dictionaries with a more academic focus have tried to bring together etymological studies in an attempt to provide definitive guides to slang while avoiding problems arising from folk etymology Folk etymology, in its basic sense, refers to popularly held beliefs about the origins of specific words, especially where these originate in "common-sense" assumptions rather than serious research (compare folk science, folk psychology etc.). In historical linguistics, the term is most often used in a more technical sense, to refer to a and false etymology Folk etymology, in its basic sense, refers to popularly held beliefs about the origins of specific words, especially where these originate in "common-sense" assumptions rather than serious research (compare folk science, folk psychology etc.). In historical linguistics, the term is most often used in a more technical sense, to refer to a. The study of slang is now taken seriously by academics, especially lexicographers General lexicography focuses on the design, compilation, use and evaluation of general dictionaries, i.e. dictionaries that provide a description of the language in general use. Such a dictionary is usually called a general dictionary or LGP dictionary. Specialized lexicography focuses on the design, compilation, use and evaluation of specialized like the late Eric Partridge Eric Honeywood Partridge was a noted New Zealand/British lexicographer of the English language, particularly of its slang, devoting their energies to the field and publishing on it, including producing slang dictionaries.

To list every dictionary of 20th- and 21st-century slang is impossible. The range, from massively researched multi-volume 'historical' dictionaries to fly-by-night glossaries posted on the Internet, defies cataloguing. Nor is it possible to restrict 'English' slang to England. While the last slang lexicographer to dominate his field, Eric Partridge, could entitle hisl book (based originally on Farmer and Henley, whose rights were owned by his publisher) as the Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (1937 et seq.) and mean just that, such exclusivity would now be foolhardy. In dictionaries as in the vocabulary, American slang has taken over, and must take equal prominence with its transatlantic forebear. In the same way, Australian slang, exemplified in the mid-20th-century work of Sidney J. Baker, has an important presence, even if Baker drew too heavily on such late 19th-century efforts as the Australian and the Sydney Slang Dictionaries, which themselves drew on both UK and US sources, rather than offering purely homegrown Australianisms. The mass media, the Internet, the role of English, or certainly Englishes, as a world language mean that its slang is equally multi-headed and its dictionaries reflect the fact.

Partridge, as mentioned, dominated much of the 20th century. As well as his 'pure' slang dictionary, he wrote a Dictionary of the Underworld and books on the military slangs of both World Wars. His is perhaps a flawed canon, his lexicographical method was less than wholly scrupulous, his inability to keep personal comment out of his definitions less than useful, his etymologizing sometimes tendentious, but his body of work can be said to have maintained the momentum of slang lexicography through the mid-20th century. He has that rare accolade: like Webster, his name became an eponym. The last edition of the DSUE appeared in 1984; the New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, wholly rewritten and expanded with US entries from 1945 onwards, appeared in 2005 edited by Tom Dalzell. Partridge's immediate successor, Jonathon Green, published his single-volume Cassell's Dictionary of Slang in 1998 and a third edition, The Chambers Slang Dictionary, much revised and expanded, in 2008; a multi-volume dictionary of slang 'on historical principles' – Green’s Dictionary of Slang – will appear in 2010.

IV. America

Slang is an urban phenomenon. Modern America seems quintessentialy urban; 19th-century America was not. Thus the century saw only one major slang dictionary: the Vocabulum (1859) by the New York chief of police, G.W. Matsell. (Its only possible predecessor is a short glossary appended by Edward Judson to his Mysteries and Miseries of New York in 1848.) Much of his vocabulary seems taken wholesale from Egan's edition of Grose, although there are a number of genuine localisms. Nonetheless, there were no contenders: Matsell remains an American pioneer. The 20th century hosted an explosion of US slang lexica. Many of these, such as Jackson and Hellyer's Vocabulary of Criminal Slang (1914), Godfrey Irwin's American Tramp and Underworld Slang (1931), Hyman E. Goldin's Dictionary of American Underworld Lingo (1950), or the wide-ranging specialist work of David Maurer, published in the journal American Speech and elsewhere, point up the wide variety of US criminal slang. More general works include Maurice H. Weseen's Dictionary of American Slang (1934), Berrey and Van der Bark's American Thesaurus of Slang (1942, 1952), Harold Wentworth and Stuart Berg Flexner's Dictionary of American Slang (1960, 1975) and pre-eminently Jonathan Lighter's multi-volume work in progress, The Historical Dictionary of American Slang (1994 et seq.). Specialist works abound, especially as regard such sources of slang as the campus, African-American speech, drugs and war. Among these are Connie Eble's series of 'Campus Slang' glossaries (1972 et seq.), the works of Edith A. Folb (Runnin' Down Some Lines, 1980) and Geneva Smitherman (Black Talk, 1994), Richard A. Spears (The Slang and Jargon of Drink and Drugs, 1986) and Gregory C. Clark (Words of the Vietnam War, 1990).

There have also been more tongue-in-cheek Tongue-in-cheek is a term used to refer to humor in which a statement, or an entire fictional work, is not meant to be taken seriously, but its sarcasm is subtle. The origin of its usage comes from when Spanish minstrels would perform for various dukes in the 18th century; these dukes would silently chastise the silliness of the minstrel's efforts which tend to focus on the more vulgar slang terms:

The Urban Dictionary occupies a similar end of the spectrum. While offering definitions for actual terms, it relies on user contributions which can introduce both humour and inaccuracies. It has also recently been published in book form:

See also

External links

Categories: Cant languages | Slang Categories: Sociolinguistics | Language varieties and styles | Words | Dialects | Linguistics books

 

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