Slang and its analogues past and present, volume 3 [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.

About this book

This volume is a scholarly reference work that catalogues the slang, cant and “heterodox speech” of English‑speaking society from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. Compiled by John Stephen Farmer and William Ernest Henley, it presents entries alphabetically, each entry giving the term, its part of speech, historical citations and a list of synonyms in several European languages. The opening pages illustrate the format with the entry for “Italian Synonyms” and a series of related words such as “flag of defiance,” “flam,” “flank,” and “flap,” each accompanied by quotations ranging from Florio (1598) to Thackeray (1859) and cross‑references to other entries. The book therefore serves as a comparative dictionary, linking English slang to French, German, Italian and other equivalents while tracing each word’s evolution over three centuries.

The prose is dense and erudite, reflecting the Victorian‑era lexicographical tradition of exhaustive citation and occasional scholarly asides. Its tone is that of a learned antiquarian, assuming familiarity with older literary sources and with the mechanics of historical linguistics. Readers who relish the minutiae of language change, philologists, historians of everyday culture, and anyone fascinated by the colorful underbelly of past speech, will find this work rewarding. It is less suited to casual readers, but for those who enjoy digging through archival quotations and multilingual synonym tables, the volume offers a rich, immersive glimpse into the shifting slang of a bygone age.

Opening lines

Italian Synonyms.—Marchese (Florio), marchesano (= menses. Michel says, Art. marque = a month, a woman. “Il ne saurait être douteux que ce nom ne soit venu à cette division de l’année, de l’infirmité périodique qu’ont les marques, ou femmes, lors que la Lune, pour tenir sa diette et vaquer à ses purifications menstruelles, fait marquer les logis feminins par son fourrier, lequel pour escusson n’a que son impression rouge”). …

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