Thieves’ Cant Masterpost

Thieves’ Cant by Jessica Trevino

D&D resources

• Guide to Thieves Cant for D&D
• Rogue Week: Thieves Cant
• Slang and Vernacular: Inventing a cant for your RPG world
• D&D with Dael Kingsmill: Thieves’ Cant (video) / PDF / reddit thread
• List of Thieves’ Guild names
• Criminal nicknames generators

English Thieves’ Cant and Slang

• Uncovering Thieves’ Cant, the Slang of the Underworld
• Secret Languages: Argot
• Wandering Languages: From Cant to Slang
• The takeaway language of slang
• 10 slang phrases that perfectly sum up their era
• A definition of slang
• The poetry of slang
• The Largest Historical Dictionary of English Slang Now Free Online
• Who were the Rogues who canted / 16th century
• Thieves’ Cant: Terms of the Canting Crew / 17th century
• The Twenty-Seven Ranks of The Canting Crew / 17th century
• Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue / 1785
• A to Z Guide to Street Slang from the 1700s / 18th century
• Thieves’ Cant Database / 18th century and Regency
• Thieves’ Cant: Hanging / 18th century and Regency
• Thieves’ Cant: A life of crime / 18th century and Regency
• Thieves’ Cant: Violence / 18th century and Regency
• Thieves’ Cant: Rackets / 18th century and Regency
• Victorian Criminal Slang / 19th century
• “Got the morbs”: Passing English of the Victorian era / 19th century
• Hobo Slang: Dictionary of hobo vocabulary and idioms / 1880s – 1910s
• Hobo Signs / 1930s
• Cockney Rhyming Slang / 19th-20th century
• The Story of Adam and Eve in Cockney Rhyming Slang / 2009

French Argot

• Victor Hugo on slang as a language
• Balzac on slang
• The origins of French argot / 15th-16th century
• François Villon’s ballads in jargon / 15th century
• When “philosophy” was code for “banned books” / 18th century
• Dictionnaire d’Argot, by Vidocq / 19th century
• Argot français classique: online dictionary / 19th century
• Dictionnaire thématique français-argot, by Jules Lermina / 1900

Other Languages

• Mediterranean Lingua Franca (Sabir) / pidgin, 11th-19th century
• Banu Sasan: the medieval islamic underworld and its cant
• Lunfardo: the slang of the Buenos Aires underworld and tango
• Kaliarda: the gay Greek cant
• Polari: How gay men used to speak, a short film in Polari
• Polari, gay cants, cant as an act of defiance and assorted musings
• The slang of old Odessa / Isaac Babel’s Odessa Stories
• List of cants from around the world

Profanity makes everything better

• How and when did our current cusswords come to existing?
• Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing (excerpt)
• A F*cking Short History of the F-Word
• “O d fuckin Abbot”
• Chaucer’s Vulgar Tongue
• Compilation of Shakespearean Insults
• Timeline of genitalia slang–a cock compendium, if you will
• 18th century genitalia slang
• Mark Twain on profanity
• Vulgarity

Bits and pieces and other

• “rogue”
• “to amuse”
• “just-ass”
• “whipjack”
• “mushfake”
• “bagpipe” and “gamahuche”
• “kinchin-co” and other words for urchin
• “to cozen”
• “little snakesman”
• “cagou” / French, from the initiation rite to the Court of Miracles
• “Dietrich” and other nicknames for lockpicks / German
• Thieves Guild Shadowmarks from Skyrim, and real life counterparts
• A Rogue by any other name…
• Rogues are never just “clever”
• Words of the trade: to steal (thesaurus)
• Words of the trade: Rogue Varieties
• Words of the trade: lewd and vulgar villains and riff-raff (that’s us commoners)

Bibliography here.

Archive tags: thieves’ cant, slang, argot, words of the trade, profanity makes everything better.