A History of Cant and Slang Dictionaries

Julie Coleman is Professor of English Language at the University of Leicester and and founder of the Leicester English Grammar Project. Her research interests lie in the history of the English language, particularly the history of the lexis and the slang and cant dictionary tradition. She is the author of A Thesaurus of Love, Sex, and Marriage, Rodopi 1999. The first two volumes of her history of cant and slang dictionaries, on the periods 1567-1784 and 1785-1858, were published by OUP in 2004 and the third (1859-1936) was published at the end of 2008.

• Introduction ; 1. Eric partridge's Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English ; 2. Dictionaries of Military Slang ; 3. Dictionaries of British Slang ; 4. Legacies of Empire and Declarations of Independence: Dictionaries of the Slang of Newer Nations ; 5. Dictionaries of American Slang ; 6. Glossaries of School and College Slang ; 7. Dictionaries of Race and Music ; 8. Dictionaries of Youth ; 9. Glossaries of Sexuality ; 10. Dictionaries of Drugs Slang ; 11. Dictionaries of Crime and Incarceration ; 12. Dictionaries of new Technologies: Citizens' Band Radio and Computers ; 13. Conclusion ; Bibliography ; Subject Index ; Word Index

The foremost achievement of the four completed volumes of Coleman's History of Cant and Slang Dictionaries is simply that they offer an accurate and comprehensive survey of so much material, and make sense of such complex traditions... A notice of the first voluem in Language (Farquharson 2007) called it 'a treasure trove of exemplary research': so it is, but it is also a treasure map, which will guide all work in the field for the forseeable future.