John Camden Hotten’s The Slang Dictionary is a pioneering Victorian survey of the unofficial English language — the cant, slang, and vulgar speech of the streets, markets, and underworld. Hotten gathered thousands of terms with their meanings and origins, treating low language with scholarly curiosity.
The book includes an entertaining history of slang and accounts of the secret vocabularies of thieves, costermongers, and other groups. It captures a vivid layer of nineteenth-century speech that polite dictionaries ignored. For students of language, social history, or simply the colorful underside of English, Hotten’s dictionary remains an engaging and valuable record.