18th Century and Regency Thieves' Cant

Strictly speaking, a distinction should be made between general slang terms and terms only used by the London underworld. These distinctions are hard to make and I will leave it to the experts. Since thieves would also use general slang it is not unreasonable to regard the whole as the way thieves would have spoken.

I have divided the terms up into fairly arbitrary subject categories (see the menu on the left). I am happy to receive feedback on how this might be better done.

A quick note that my book Cant: A Gentleman's Guide is available in both print and ebook format. Click on the cover image on the right for more details.

If you would like a free ebook copy for review, email me via stephen at pascalbonenfant.com and let me know your preferred format (MOBI or ePUB).

I have used three sources:from Nathan Bailey's 1737and the 1811based on Francis Grose'sand the glossary from the, published in 1819.. I have included a fuller discussion of canting sources on a separate page.

I have put both dictionaries into a Cant Database Search facility. This has the complete (or nearly complete) contents of both Bailey and The Lexicon but a lot of the 1811 ones will appear in the "Uncategorised" category. I am getting them categorised but it is a slow, manual process.

Listed by Category

I have also added some categorised pages. These are mostly complete for Bailey and Vaux but much of The Lexicon is still not in there. Pages are: