Browse Items (15 total)

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…

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…

Publishing a candid “dictionary of homophile cant” in 1972 took courage. Just three years since the Stonewall uprising, homosexuality was still classed as “sexual deviation” and was illegal in 46 of the 50 states. But Bruce Rodgers was convinced that…

Bandleader Cab Calloway integrated “jive” into his sets at Harlem’s legendary Cotton Club, one of the few places where white audiences could hear Black music in the 1930s. As “Professor Cab Calloway,” he facetiously lectured delighted audiences by…

If A Feminist Dictionary doesn’t look much like other dictionaries, that’s because it’s an avowed polemic rather than a work of practical lexicography. Professors Cheris Kramarae and Paula Treichler produced what one archivist called “sort of a cross…

Linguists began to take African American speech seriously in the early 20th century, but it took until 1970 to get a book-length dictionary. Poet and novelist Clarence Major took many words from jazz (offbeat). Some are joyous (hot dog!) and some…

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…

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…

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:…

Grose’s Provincial Glossary (1787) was one of the earliest attempts to document versions of the language spoken in England outside London, Oxbridge, and the Home Counties. In 1814, Samuel Pegge wrote a supplement that was then combined into Grose’s…