Dictionnaire d’argot fin-de-siècle by Charles Virmaître is a glossary of unofficial speech — the slang, cant, and colloquial terms that formal dictionaries often ignore. It records a vivid layer of everyday language with its meanings and origins.
Preserved here as a free public-domain EPUB, the book is part of Better Gutenberg’s Language & Communication shelf, which gathers foundational texts in linguistics, rhetoric, etymology, and the study of languages. Whether you come to it as a scholar, a student, or a lover of words, it offers a lasting record of how earlier generations understood and described human speech. Note that this volume is written in French.