Thieves’ Cant by Jessica Trevino
D&D resources
- Guide to Thieves Cant for D&D [x]
- 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 [+] [x]
- Secret Languages: Argot [x]
- Wandering Languages: From Cant to Slang [x]
- The takeaway language of slang [x]
- 10 slang phrases that perfectly sum up their era [x]
- A definition of slang
- The poetry of slang [x]
- 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 [+] [+] [x] / 1785
- A to Z Guide to Street Slang from the 1700s [x] / 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.
Roguish 