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.
I have used two sources: Collection of Canting Words from Nathan Bailey's 1737 The New Canting Dictionary and the 1811 Lexicon Balatronicum based on Francis Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. 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.
I have also added some categorised pages. These are mostly complete for Bailey but a lot of The Lexicon is still not in there. Pages and subheadings within those pages are as follows: