Slang and its analogues past and present, volume 2 [of 7] : A dictionary,…
How to speak with the dead by Sciens is a historical slang dictionary written in the late 19th century. It compiles the “heterodox” speech of many classes over centuries, pairing definitions with origins, dated citations, and synonyms across several European languages. The likely focus is tracing how nonstandard English—cant, colloquial, and criminal argot—developed and was used rather than offering a narrative. The opening of the work sets out the title matter for
Volume II (covering C to early F) and immediately begins alphabetized entries starting with cab, cabbage, cad, and their many offshoots. Each headword is broken into numbered senses (often obsolete or regional), with thorough etymologies, abundant illustrative quotations, cross-references, and long synonym lists (including French, German, Italian, Spanish, and thieves’ cant). Representative entries show the range: cab as a schoolboy “crib” and an obsolete term for a brothel; cabbage as tailors’ pilferings, a “crib,” a cigar, a body-part vulgarism, and a verb “to pilfer”; cackle for idle talk and a cluster of theatrical derivatives; cad for ill-bred persons and omnibus conductors; and calaboose for jail. Scattered throughout are rhyming slang (Cain and Abel = table), school and university usages (call, calx), military and nautical phrases, and American and Australian colloquialisms, signaling the volume’s comparative, documentary method from the outset. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
Read or download for free
For an overview of the different reading options, see our Reading Guide
| Reading Options | Url | Size | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Read now! | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77292.html.images | 1.9 MB | |||
| EPUB3 (E-readers incl. Send-to-Kindle) | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77292.epub3.images | 1.2 MB | |||
| EPUB (older E-readers) | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77292.epub.images | 1.2 MB | |||
| EPUB (no images, older E-readers) | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77292.epub.noimages | 737 kB | |||
| Kindle | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77292.kf8.images | 2.4 MB | |||
| older Kindles | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77292.kindle.images | 2.4 MB | |||
| Plain Text UTF-8 | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77292.txt.utf-8 | 1.3 MB | |||
| Download HTML (zip) | https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/77292/pg77292-h.zip | 1.2 MB | |||
| There may be more files related to this item. | |||||
Similar Books
About this eBook
| Author | Farmer, John Stephen, 1854-1916 |
|---|---|
| Author | Henley, William Ernest, 1849-1903 |
| Title | Slang and its analogues past and present, volume 2 [of 7] : A dictionary, historical and comparative, of the heterodox speech of all classes of society for more than three hundred years. With synonyms in English, French, German, Italian, etc. |
| Original Publication | [London] :"Printed for Subscribers Only", 1890, pubdate 1904. |
| Credits | Jeroen Hellingman and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at www.pgdp.net/ for Project Gutenberg (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries) |
| Language | English |
| LoC Class | PE: Language and Literatures: English |
| Subject | English language -- Slang -- Dictionaries |
| Subject | Slang -- Dictionaries |
| Category | Text |
| EBook-No. | 77292 |
| Release Date | Nov 22, 2025 |
| Copyright Status | Public domain in the USA. |
| Downloads | 4273 downloads in the last 30 days. |
| Project Gutenberg eBooks are always free! | |