Hard, Bad Words: The Earliest English Slang Dictionaries

The pre-history of English slang dictionaries begins as early as the brief wordlist – just over 100 items – Thomas Harman appended to his A Caveat or Warening for Commen Cursetors (1566), a pamphlet that exposed how vagabonds and beggars practised on unwary citizens – public anxiety was high in the age of so-called ‘masterless men’. The cant he reported was so interesting to readers that Caveat went rapidly through several printings and the wordlist ended up in books by others, sometimes wholesale, in others adapted, in a textual heritage that extends into the seventeenth century, with Martin Mark-all, Beadle of Bridewell (1610), by the semi-anonymous S. R. Interest in cant renewed in mid-century, with Richard Head’s The English Rogue (1655), with a wordlist of less than 200, though the list was lengthened slightly between the two editions published that year. As with Harman, several later authors borrowed Head’s glossary, through to the History of the Live and Actions of Jonathan Wild (1725). (The textual interrelationships among wordlists in both the Harman and Head families are accounted for thoroughly in Coleman Volume 1, 20–75).

The cant wordlist tradition ended in 1725, but the first dictionary of English slang had already appeared by then, in 1699. The transition from list to book was no coincidence. The earliest English dictionaries were wordlists, too, but included considerably more entries than Harman’s and Head’s. They focused on supposedly ‘hard words’ rather than general vocabulary, and one might view the cant wordlists as in the ‘hard words’ vein of lexicography – the language of thieves, vagabonds, and rogues, for the average speaker of English was as hard to understand as Latinate terms were for schoolboys. To grasp the meaning of such terms, all one needed was a more familiar gloss, a synonym or two. Such dictionaries defined words but did not treat them as objects worthy of extended investigation.

Over the course of the seventeenth century until publication of Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), lexicographers developed increasingly complex dictionary structures motivated by new assumptions about lexical knowledge and readers’ interests. Edward Phillips’s The New World of Words (1658), Elisha Coles’s An English Dictionary (1676), John Kersey’s A New English Dictionary (1702), and Nathan Bailey’s Universal Etymological Dictionary (1721) established this lexicographical trajectory (for commentary, see Starnes and Noyes 1991 and Read 2003). The New World of Words treated approximately 11,000 words and is more closely aligned with the ‘hard words’ tradition than the other two; An English Dictionary ran to as much as 25,000 items, including cant terms from Head’s list; A New English Dictionary included still more, at roughly 28,000 entries. Along the same line, that is, in keeping with contemporary developments in lexicography, the semi-anonymous B. E., Gent., published A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew (1699), narrower in scope, so on a smaller scale, at some 4,000 items.

Several features of B. E.’s dictionary follow modern dictionary practice. First, it provides multiple senses for polysemous words, especially those with standard as well as cant, slang, or jargon meanings. Second, he labels register, so that cant terms are marked with a ‘c’. Third, he ventures several etymologies, my favourite of which is that in the entry for taudry:

It sounds like a perfect folk etymology, but it’s actually more or less correct – the OED says so (s.v. tawdry lace). Most important, however, is not the truth of the matter, but that from B. E. forward, slang lexicography assumes that readers want etymologies, analysis of polysemy, labelling, etc., and that any adequate explanation of English vocabulary – cant and slang included – depends on such explanatory features. Slang lexicography thus emulated lexicography of standard English.

English Vulgar and Flashy

The great event of eighteenth-century English slang lexicography was publication of Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785). The third edition (1796) saw several printings. Captain Grose was an officer successively in the Hampshire and Surrey militias but also a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, an avid collector of provincial words, as well as cant and slang. His Classical Dictionary was somewhat smaller than B. E.’s, at just less than 3,900 entries. He viewed slang as a broad concept, something like Eric Partridge’s ‘unconventional English’, including the innocuous babble and the vulgar and obscene cunt. His dictionary includes features that suggest he paid attention, not only to general dictionaries of the period – Bailey’s and Johnson’s – but also to B. E.’s. Some entries include etymologies, others observations on usage, still others labels. Perhaps most significantly, Grose on occasion refers to other dictionaries and, Coleman (Volume 2, 21) proves, provides illustrative citations in 11.5 per cent of entries, improving on B. E., though far short of Johnson. Grose’s dictionary, itself perennially successful, gave rise to any number of other slang dictionaries (see Coleman Volume 2, 72–105). Until mid-century Grose was the pre-eminent influence on slang lexicography and chief provider of knowledge about English slang.

Grose’s Classical Dictionary varies in tone: generally, it is detached (or scientific), but sometimes preceptive (or normative), and occasionally even facetious. Grose saw no reason to write in one and only one tone, and lexicographical theory and practice had not yet regularised dictionary style to an absolute seriousness. Johnson wrote facetiously, for instance, in his infamous definitions of lexicographer, ‘a writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words’ and oats, ‘a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people’. In following Johnson’s practice, Grose merely kept pace with the lexicography of his time. In the second edition, for instance, he includes an entry for Richard Snary, with the following definition and etymology: ‘A dictionary. A country lad, having been reproved for calling persons by their Christian names, being sent by his master to borrow a dictionary, thought to shew his breeding by asking for a Richard Snary’. Were the story true, it hardly warranted the entry, but one suspects Grose of having invented the word and written a folk etymology to justify it, all for fun. Today, we think of dictionaries as scientific reference works rather than joke books, but Grose’s occasionally facetious style reminds us that not all audiences turn to dictionaries for information only or prefer a detached tone. Cant, jargon, and slang tempt wit. Readers of slang dictionaries often hope to be entertained, and, sometimes, their correspondent lexicographers have obliged.

In Life in London (1821), Pierce Egan brought ‘flash’ language to national and even international attention. Flash admits several related senses, not easily teased from one another. Following the OED (s.v. flash, adj.3), it can mean ‘connected with or pertaining to the class of thieves, tramps, and prostitutes’, but also ‘connected with […] the class of sporting men’ and ‘knowing, wide-awake, “smart”, “fly”’, as well as ‘dashing, ostentatious, swaggering, “swell”’. In the conflation of these senses, flash raised the social prestige of slang. Slang might be vulgar and cant the language of thieves, but neither was only that – representatives of high and low life mingled around the ropes of the boxing ring. In the wordlists of Life in London, Egan elevated both slang and its lexicography. On the heels of that book, he brought out a new edition of Grose’s third edition of the Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1823). Thus, he moved into new sociolexical territory while acknowledging and extending an earlier tradition of slang lexicography.

Victorian Slang Dictionaries: From Hotten to Farmer and Henley

John Camden Hotten was a London bookseller. The first book he published was his own Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant, and Other Vulgar Words (1859), which registered over 2,000 slang words. The work was revised four times, and each edition included new entries. Indeed, by the time of the posthumous fifth edition (1874), the dictionary had expanded to include more than twice the original entries. No major dictionary of English slang had appeared after Egan’s edition of Grose, so Hotten’s filled the gap, satisfied the public appetite for slang, and remained dominant until nearly the end of the century, when John Stephen Farmer and William Ernest Henley published their far superior Slang and Its Analogues, Past and Present (1890–1904), in seven volumes.

Far from perfect, Hotten’s dictionary was more professional than Grose’s. Following post-Johnsonian dictionaries of standard English, he introduced new features into slang dictionaries, for instance, frontmatter that explains slang and its history. He also intensified features by then considered essential to a good dictionary: roughly half of his entries attempt etymologies, although, as he points out in a cautionary note on the first page of entries in the third edition: ‘Slang derivations are generally indirect, turning upon metaphor and fanciful allusions, and other than direct etymological connexion. Such allusions and fancies are essentially temporary or local; they rapidly pass out of the public mind; the word remains, while the key to its origin is lost’ (Hotten 1865, 65). Grose had labelled cant as distinct from slang, and thus slang emerged as a register on his watch; but Hotten was the first to use slang in his dictionary’s title, after which it became the umbrella term for several registers, from cant to flash. He was the first lexicographer to treat rhyming slang and back slang.

Hotten drew on a fairly extensive bibliography of printed works, but he also conducted fieldwork, lurking in alleyways himself and engaging agents to collect yet more material, probably under the influence of Henry Mayhew, whose London Labour and the London Poor (1851) he acknowledged as a source. All these features of method and analysis represent advances in English lexicography. Hotten, though a publisher of American works, stuck with English slang in his dictionary. One might criticise him for such parochialism, but perhaps he simply knew his audience.

More significantly, he fell short on expectations raised by Grose and defended by his successors in the tradition of slang lexicography, Farmer and Henley, but wholly in keeping with Victorian manners: ‘Filthy and obscene words’, he wrote, ‘have been excluded’. While heralding his incrementally increasing wordlist, Hotten ignored many words in the slang register of English. Farmer and Henley supplied this deficiency and ended up in court defending the principle that recording obscene vocabulary in a dictionary is not the same as committing obscenity. They lost the case in 1891, but the argument has since justified not only slang dictionaries but all dictionaries in their treatment of the whole vocabulary, rather than just the words some people prefer to hear or read. Mounting this defence was perhaps their greatest gift to lexicography and linguistics.

Yet Slang and Its Analogues achieved much more than mere principle. At last, a dictionary of English slang included American and Australian slang. The number of entries correspondingly expanded to approximately 20,000, leaps and bounds beyond any previous slang dictionary. And, doubtless with the OED’s example in mind, about 50 per cent of entries include citations. Nearly all entries employ usage labels; nearly three-quarters indicate grammatical function; etymologies. Farmer and Henley also elevated the most boring element of dictionary entry structure, cross-references – theirs are frequent and accurate. In all of these features, Farmer and Henley converged on the canons of lexicography established by mainstream nineteenth-century dictionaries of English – Webster, Richardson, Ogilvie, and ultimately the OED. Still, their practice fell short of those models. It took another century before any one produced even part of an historical dictionary of English slang to complement the OED.

The Partridge Family: Slang Lexicography of the Twentieth Century

In the twentieth century, speakers of English gradually let down their hair, indulged teen culture, and levelled social hierarchies – lots more slang was spoken, heard, and printed than ever before, and there were many slang dictionaries of all imaginable sizes of all imaginable niche vocabularies (Coleman, Volume IV). Here, we can address only the most significant dictionaries of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the most ambitious and durably influential, the most comprehensive and, in lexicographical terms, historical.

Eric Partridge redefined slang lexicography in the twentieth century, not always for the better, but indelibly, and because his work was so popular, his dictionaries are significant, not just in the history of lexicography, but in the history of Anglophone culture. Partridge arrived in England from New Zealand, in 1921, on a Queensland Visiting Fellowship, entering Balliol College, and remained there, with a non-standard accent, for the rest of his life. His undergraduate years at the University of Queensland had been interrupted by service in World War I, and out of that experience, he and John Brophy edited Songs and Slang of the British Soldier 1914–1918 (1930). The following years saw publication of American Tramp and Underworld Slang (Irwin 1931), for which Partridge was assistant editor, and a new edition of Grose’s third edition of 1796 (1931), all three works published by Partridge’s own Scholartis Press. By the time his book, Slang Today and Yesterday (1933), appeared, his interest and expertise in slang were well established.

Partridge published the twentieth century’s most important Anglophone slang dictionary, the Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (DSUE)( 1937), which he revised six times before he died in 1979. In part, its significance lay in its length. The fifth edition (1961) ran to 1,362 double-column pages, comprising the original dictionary – with over 55,000 entries and a section of addenda including another 1,100 or so – and a supplement that gathered together the addenda for all previous volumes and yet newer material. DSUE is not an historical dictionary – its entries do not identify the first extant use of a headword and do not include a quotation paragraph in the style of the OED – but they do quote sources occasionally, refer to use in texts and earlier treatment in dictionaries, and opine on the period of earliest use. Partridge follows Johnson as much as he follows the developed lexicography – general/commercial or historical – of his time. Like Johnson, given the chance, he cannot resist a pithy, opinionated comment occasioned by a word or its definition. For instance, in the fifth edition supplement, he defines quota quicky as ‘A short British film put on a cinema programme to fulfil the regulation concerning the quota of British films to be used, in Britain, in proportion to foreign (including American) films: cinema world: 1936. (It doesn’t matter how short the films are; a nasty reflection on British films.)’ The definition and the parenthetical comment illustrate an encyclopaedic tendency that diverged from mainstream modern lexicographical practice.

Partridge’s title, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, anticipated and – in its copiousness – attempted to avoid the problems of slang as a term for linguists or anyone else. Yet, remarkably, Partridge refused to include American slang in DSUE, which certainly limited its scope and obscured the history of some Anglophone slang terms while simply ignoring others – many others. The American alternative, Harold Wentworth and Stuart Berg Flexner’s Dictionary of American Slang (1960), came to the game late and thin; in terms both of the number of entries and the density of treatment, it remained thin even in later revisions by Robert L. Chapman, compared to DSUE, which prompted Jonathan Lighter to attempt an historical dictionary of American slang, as discussed below.

Partridge wrote with assurance and, rhetorically, this served him well with a popular audience and to some degree teachers and scholars, too. Often, however, he is simply in error. As Coleman (Volume 4, 16) observes: ‘Providing precise dates for a notoriously slippery movement of terms between levels of informality was a bold development, but this appearance of authority is undermined by Partridge’s deductive dating’. So, Partridge correctly identifies O.K. as ‘orig. U.S.’, but misdates it terribly, at c. 1880, when in fact it appeared first in 1839, a much more precise date than Partridge could deduce from the evidence at hand. Etymologies are often as bad as the dates, partly because, though he was a good Latinist, Partridge had little to no direct knowledge of other Indo-European languages. As the novelist and sometime lexicographer Anthony Burgess (1980, 27) put it memorably, ‘he preferred a shaky etymology to none at all’, but etymology, especially by amateurs, requires restraint, a willingness to say nothing rather than introduce falsehoods into knowledge. Arguably, too, Partridge’s work lacked sociological perspective and grounding in the sort of speech facts uncovered by fieldwork, so it gradually lost status among language scholars to sociolinguistic treatments of slang and historical lexicography.

Still, DSUE’s reputation was so strong that Paul Beale could publish a substantially revised Eighth Edition as late as 1984. Then, Tom Dalzell and Terry Victor arranged with Routledge, publisher of DSUE from the beginning, to bring out a freshly conceived two-volume New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (NPDSUE), the first edition of which appeared in 2006. First among NPDSUE’s virtues over the original is its comprehensive attention to American slang. Second, it ignores etymology entirely – thus minimising error – and dates according to other authorities – in most cases – rather than ‘deductively’. It labels items geographically – UK, US, AUSTRALIA – but not according to register or ‘levels of informality’. It is not an historical dictionary, but each entry is accompanied by one or two illustrative quotations.

Partridge’s DSUE appealed to readers partly because it was so idiosyncratic, to slang what H. W. Fowler’s A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926) was to English usage – pungent, thoughtful, occasionally witty, critical, intuitive, and so appealing rhetorically that, though wrong (in the case of Partridge) or opinionated (in the case of Fowler), though written for a specific generation, it could last unexpectedly and perhaps inexplicably for generations. Dalzell and Victor’s NPDSUE, in contrast, is the twenty-first century’s great general-purpose dictionary of Anglophone slang. It provides an option for lovers or students of slang lighter than historical slang dictionaries of roughly the same period.

Two Historical Dictionaries of English Slang

Towards the end of the twentieth century, two talented and unusually committed lexicographers, Jonathan Lighter and Jonathon Green, ventured into historical dictionaries of slang. Lighter published the first and second volumes of his as the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang (HDAS) (1985 and 1993), covering the alphabetical range from A–O, but a series of problems led to suspension of the project, which is still incomplete. Green later published his massive, three-volume Green’s Dictionary of Slang (GDoS) (Green 2010), perhaps standard and indispensable dictionary of English slang for the foreseeable future.

Lighter was a precocious lexicographer, having compiled his first work, ‘The Slang of the American Expeditionary Forces in Europe, 1917–1919: An Historical Glossary’ (1972) – published as an almost entire issue of the journal American Speech – while he was an undergraduate at the University of Tennessee. Encouraged by this début, he started work on what would become HDAS, with a draft of the A section submitted as his doctoral dissertation. Random House published the first two volumes of HDAS but withdrew from the project after it was acquired by Bertelsmann and its language reference division was closed. Oxford University Press later adopted the project but has not proceeded with it. These abandonments have nothing to do with Lighter’s scholarship, and HDAS A–O rightly enjoys a high reputation among linguists, lexicographers, historians of English, and an admiring public.

Lighter plumbs the textual well of American slang underlying HDAS thoroughly and he analyses senses and defines like a new Webster. The entry for bull, for instance, unfolds into seventeen senses – some with subsenses – followed by accounts of bull’s use in phrases and proverbs, on the latter of which his treatment is reliably strong throughout the dictionary. Combinations like bull butter ‘margarine’ and bullshit – and even further extended combinations like bullshit bomber, ‘an aircraft or airman engaged in psychological warfare operations, as dropping leaflets or broadcasting propaganda messages’ – receive their own entries. In cases like this one, we see Lighter’s virtues as a definer: it is elegantly written, precise, and concise, but not too concise – a less adept definer might have stopped at ‘psychological warfare’, yet the examples of ‘psychological warfare operations’ clarify the aptness of bullshit in this context. The primary sense of bullshit is defined with similar grace and also care to delineate the word’s full semantic extension, as illustrated by the accompanying quotations: ‘lies, nonsense, exaggeration, or flattery; trickery or tomfoolery’.

As with Lighter and HDAS, Green had been working up to GDoS for a very long time. His Dictionary of Contemporary Slang (Green 1984, 1992, and 1995) started with about 15,000 entries and grew slightly longer and heavier with each edition. Clearly, it helped satiate the reading public’s appetite for slang, and led the market for a spate of other user-friendly dictionaries of roughly the same period, such as the third edition of Robert L. Chapman’s Dictionary of American Slang (1995), which was based on Wentworth and Flexner; John Ayto’s Oxford Dictionary of Slang (1998); Tony Thorne’s Dictionary of Contemporary Slang (DCS) (1990), now in its fourth edition; Richard Spears’ NTC’s Dictionary of American Slang and Colloquial Expressions (1989); and Pamela Munro’s Slang U. (1989), compiled from material developed by her students at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Yet Green was all along working on a more ambitious project, and DCS was immediately superseded by Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang (CDS) (1998 and 2005), which treats slang from the 1700s to what was then the present. CDS swallowed DCS whole, and, with the second edition, Green had added some 70,000 entries that stretched to 1,565 pages of double-column text. CDS entries were compact but indicated rough dates of use in brackets after the headword, identified region – it recorded slang from throughout the Anglophone world – and provided more etymological information than DCS. CDS was an unusual dictionary in both scope and style – Ayto includes dates at which items first entered English and usually a single quotation to illustrate use, as does Thorne, who also comments on usage and word history more often and commendably, compared to dictionaries of similar size and purpose, but Thorne’s dictionary includes roughly 7,000 senses of slang words, while Ayto’s included over 10,000 items, but nowhere near the slang wordhoard collected in CDS, in either case.

Green’s ultimate project, towards which the other dictionaries were increasingly confident steps, was GDoS, which Julie Coleman (2012, 193) judged ‘the best historical dictionary of English slang there is, ever has been or (in print at least) is ever likely to be’. Originally published in three heavy volumes at 2,204 pages, including something like 53,000 entries, many of them treating impressively polysemous words, amply illustrated with more than 415,000 quotations, it justly deserves the accolades it has received. Based on an astonishingly full bibliography – roughly 6,000 works are listed, even though the list includes only those cited at least five times – it turns over lots of stones in the back alleys of slang c. 1000 to nearly the present, though, of course, many stones are still left unturned. However, since launching an online edition in 2016 (in partnership with David P. Kendal), Green has turned some more, adding 2,500 new entries comprising 5,000 new word senses, and more than 60,000 new quotations throughout the dictionary text.

The quotations are the lifeblood of GDoS or any other historical dictionary. They bring slang items both to light and to life. There is much to praise in Green’s execution, much to criticise, too (Adams 2012). Though one might complain about some of his etymologies, others reflect his profound familiarity with English popular culture, especially London’s, but those of the US and Australia, as well. For instance, he identifies the origin of foxy grandpa, ‘sly person, neither necessarily old nor a grandfather’, in ‘the cartoon character Foxy Grandpa, by C. E. Schultze (1866–1939), which appeared c.1900 and featured an adult who in a reverse of the usual cartoon situation, played tricks on children’. Perhaps Schultze’s work was already within Green’s knowledge when he crafted the entry, or perhaps he asked the intelligent question, ‘Why foxy grandpa?’ which then prompted a search that turned Schultze up. Either way, it is evidence of sound lexicographical intuition.

Green is a discriminating purveyor of slang: when it comes to sense analysis, he is a splitter, and he compiles compelling lists of compounds, phrases, and idioms towards the ends of entries – sometimes such lists occupy a lot of entry space, much to the reader’s benefit. GDoS is also the first fully global Anglophone historical dictionary of English slang, which is not to say that it includes all items of English slang worldwide, any more than it includes all English slang from ‘inner circle’ countries, but it stretches far beyond all other slang dictionaries in this respect. As a result, forms are labelled precisely – on any two-page spread, one can tell at a glance which words hail from the West Indies or South Africa, or are from the United States but originally, largely, or specifically African-American. In the digital edition, colourful flags of the Anglophone nations pin quotations to our mental maps of the world. Timeline charts also accompany entries, so that readers confront the intersectionality of space and time in historical lexicography.

Unfortunately, on publication of the print GDoS, some reviews, especially one by Simon Winchester (2012), praised GDoS at the expense of HDAS. Winchester claimed that HDAS is inferior to GDoS in nearly every way, but careful evaluation of the two dictionaries reveals their independent strengths, and, as Geoffrey Nunberg (2012) noted after reading Winchester’s review, several of Winchester’s claims were weak or false. Green replied to Nunberg with some corrections but also with considerable poise and grace. It seems very unlikely that HDAS will ever see completion, but for slang vocabulary in the alphabetical range A-O, we are fortunate to have two complementary historical approaches to American slang. Nonetheless, GDoS is superior to HDAS in at least five ways: it includes many more quotations; it accounts for Anglophone slang worldwide; it is complete; because it is complete, it is available in a very attractive online format; and because it is online, it can be updated and revised continually.

Conclusion

Speakers of proper English may look down on slang, though they probably use it occasionally. Yet even the purist of speakers, even those at the top of the social hierarchy, even well-intentioned prescriptive teachers and clergy cannot resist pleasuring themselves with slang dictionaries. From the beginnings of slang lexicography to this day, many readers have revelled in the exotic, illicit, and thrilling aspects of Anglophone culture from a textual distance. In the privacy of one’s parlour, one may experience less conventional lives vicariously. Entry by entry, dictionaries withdraw curtains of obscurity – rhyming slang, back slang, wild metaphor, items whose etymologies rest on specific cultural moments now lost to all but lexicographical memory – and there slang lies revealed, naked by definition.

The value of slang dictionaries exceeds this sort of lexical prurience, however. Slang dictionaries are important because they provide access to words and phrases, to morphological and metaphorical strategies, of various underworlds, youth culture and its in-grouping and out-grouping, workers protesting, everyday people muttering under their breath. Adequate histories of Anglophone culture and of the English language in England or North America or elsewhere require knowledge of those words and what they have meant to those who use them. Some speakers of English – indeed, some lexicographers – may turn their heads, avert their eyes, and otherwise avoid unconventional behaviour – including language – preserving their innocence, their cultural cleanliness, they suppose, by preserving their ignorance. But avoiding facts out of distaste or embarrassment seems intellectually irresponsible and culturally callous. Indeed, the historical dictionaries of Anglophone slang are perhaps most important of all because they are the most democratic. They enable historical and cultural eavesdropping, amplifying voices of real speakers past and present, from the street just below us or from great distances, voices absent from and therefore silenced by mainstream dictionaries and authorised histories.