Release date is 2025-11-22

Jeroen Hellingman and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net/ for Project Gutenberg (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)

"Slang and its analogues past and present, volume 2 [of 7]" by Farmer and Henley is a historical and comparative slang dictionary written in the late 19th century. It catalogues nonstandard English across classes and centuries, supplying definitions, etymologies, dated quotations, and multilingual analogues. This volume ranges from C to Fizzle, highlighting variant senses, usage labels, and cross-cultural parallels.

The opening of the volume presents the C-section of entries, beginning with cab (as a schoolboy “crib,” an old term for a brothel, and a verb) and moving through a wide array of terms such as cabbage (tailors’ pilferings with an extended derivation and many senses), cabby, caboodle, caboose, cad (from omnibus conductor to ill-bred person), cadger, cage (a local lock-up), cake (a fool, and “to take the cake”), calaboose, calculate (a U.S. colloquialism), calf-love, canary (prisoner, mistress, or sovereign), candle-keepers (Winchester school rank), candyman (northern eviction hireling), canister (head or hat), cannibal (a Cambridge boat that bumps its own first crew), and canoe (“to paddle one’s own canoe”). Each entry is tightly annotated with usage domains (thieves’, schoolboy, theatrical, nautical, American, Australian), rich citation trails, etymological notes, and long lists of French, German, Italian, and Spanish synonyms, giving readers a brisk tour of how C-words evolved and were actually used. (This is an automatically generated summary.)

Originally published: London: "Printed for Subscribers Only", 1890