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Letter to Joseph T. Shipley
While working on his Dictionary of Catchphrases, Partridge turned to informants for assistance, including amateur lexicographer Joseph Shipley. This list of queries from 1975 is typical. When Partridge tried to make sense of say uncle, Shipley…
A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English
After a decade of “close observation of colloquial speech,” Eric Partridge issued the 20th century’s most popular slang dictionary, which went through many editions. In early editions he treated “unpleasant terms . . . aseptically”—meaning that…
Americanisms—Old & New: A Dictionary of Words, Phrases and Colloquialisms Peculiar to the United States, British America, the West Indies, &c., &c
John Stephen Farmer—occultist, probable pornographer, possible bigamist—focused on “the divergence . . . between the Queen’s English and the English of the New World,” words like dime, ding!, and Dixie. His interest was words “employed by general and…
A Dictionary of Slang, Jargon & Cant, embracing English, American, and Anglo-Indian slang, pidgin English, tinkers’ jargon and other irregular phraseology. 2 vols
The French writer Albert Marie Victor Barrère teamed up with a folklorist, Philadelphian Charles Godfrey Leland, to focus on the “irregular phraseology” of Britain and America, including, for the first time, words derived from Yiddish. The vocabulary…
Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words, Obsolete Phrases, Proverbs, and Ancient Customs, from the Fourteenth Century. 2 vols
James Orchard Halliwell produced one of his century’s most comprehensive guides to regional dialect. His pairing of “archaic” and “provincial” is important: many were convinced that traces of Old and Middle English survived in the living speech of…
A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue
Grose’s concern was not the language as a whole but the “vulgar” (common) speech, including slang and “cant” (the jargon of thieves and beggars). Although all dictionaries involve some degree of plagiarism, it’s especially prominent in slang…
Portrait of Francis Grose.
Francis Grose was a militia captain and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. His friend Robert Burns called him “a fine, fat, fodgel wight [plump creature] / O’ stature short, but genius bright.” He was the author of two pioneering dictionaries:…
