Word list · 26 words
Victorian slang
Victorian slang is the street, stage and barrack-room English of Britain in Queen Victoria's reign, 1837 to 1901. Every word on this list was recorded in a source from that era or just after, and each page says which one.
Most of these entries come from J. Redding Ware's Passing English of the Victorian Era, published in 1909, which collected the phrases people actually used rather than the ones grammar books approved of. A word that turns up only in a modern listicle is not on this list.
Kept on this device only, for the daily recall in My words.
The words
Afternoonified
Smart, fashionable, fit to be seen in — Victorian society slang, recorded in 1897 when a shopper turned down a draper's goods as not 'afternoonified' enough.
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Bags o' Mystery
Sausages — Victorian street slang, 'because no man but the maker knows what is in them'.
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Butter upon Bacon
Extravagance; one luxury piled on another — Victorian household English, from the old disapproval of eating buttered bread with bacon instead of the plain loaf.
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Chuckaboo
A pet name for a close friend — Victorian slang recorded in 1909, whose own recorder said it meant nothing at all.
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Church-bell
A talkative woman — rural Victorian slang, from a bell that can be heard all over the village.
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Cop a Mouse
To get a black eye — Victorian workmen's slang, because the bruise is about the colour and size of a mouse.
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Enthuzimuzzy
Enthusiasm, said mockingly — nineteenth-century society slang that makes eagerness sound faintly ridiculous.
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Gas-pipes
Tight trousers — Victorian street slang, because a narrow trouser leg looks like a length of gas pipe.
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Gigglemug
Victorian street slang for a face that is always smiling; today it is also used for the person wearing it.
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Got the Morbs
Feeling gloomy for a while — Victorian society slang of 1880, a noun made from 'morbid'.
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Mutton shunter
Victorian slang for a policeman — recorded in 1909 as police slang, dated there to 1883.
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Quockerwodger
A wooden jumping-jack puppet that jerks its limbs when you pull a string — and, in Victorian slang, a politician whose strings are pulled by someone else.
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Suggestionize
To prompt; to plant an idea in someone's mind — Victorian legal slang 'from 1889 on', used of witnesses whose memories might have been shaped by suggestion.
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Umble-cum-stumble
Thoroughly understood — lower-class Victorian slang, a rhyming jingle for 'got it, completely'.
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