The Devil's Dictionary
Encyclopedia
The Devil's Dictionary is a satirical
"reference" book written by Ambrose Bierce
. The book offers reinterpretations of terms in the English language, lampooning cant and political doublespeak
, as well as other aspects of human foolishness and frailty. It was originally published in 1906 as The Cynic's Word Book before being retitled in 1911. Modern "unabridged" versions that include Bierce "definitions" that were for various reasons missed by earlier editions continue to be popular a century later.
was a columnist in the San Francisco-based News Letter, a small weekly financial magazine which had been founded by Frederick Marriott
in the late 1850s. The News Letter, although a serious magazine aimed at businessmen, contained a page set aside for informal satirical content, entitled The Town Crier. Bierce was hired as this page's editor in December 1868, writing with satire, irreverence and a lack of inhibition, thus becoming known as the 'laughing devil' of San Francisco.
Although the origins of the Devil's Dictionary are normally placed in 1881 (the point at which Bierce himself said it began) the idea started in August 1869 when Bierce, short of topics to write about and having recently bought a new copy of Webster's Unabridged dictionary, suggested the possibility of writing a"Comic Dictionary" . He quoted the entry from Webster's for Vicegerent
s and italicised the section,
He then suggested how Noah Webster
might have used his talent in a comic form and it was here that the idea of a Comic Dictionary was born.
The idea manifested itself in 1875 when Bierce, who had resigned at the Town Crier and had spent three years in London
, returned to San Francisco in the hope of regaining his earlier journalistic post in the News Letter. He sent two submissions to the editor of the News Letter, both written under aliases, one of which was entitled The Demon's Dictionary and contained 48 words with new definitions in Bierce's trademark style of acerbic wit. Although forgotten by Ambrose Bierce in his compiling of the Devil's Dictionary, these entries were made available in the Enlarged Devil's Dictionary, which was first published in 1967.
, of which he had become an editor in March 1877). Nevertheless, he used the idea of comic definitions in his columns dated November 17, 1877, and September 14, 1878.
It was in early 1881 that Bierce first used the title, The Devil's Dictionary, while editor-in-chief of another weekly San Francisco magazine, The Wasp
. The "dictionary" proved popular, and during his time in this post (1881–86) he included 88 installments, each of 15-20 new definitions.
In 1887 Bierce became an editor in The Examiner
and featured "The Cynic's Dictionary," which was to be the last of his "dictionary" columns until they reappeared in 1904, when they continued erratically before finishing in July 1906.
A number of the definitions are accompanied by satiric verses, many of which are signed with comic pseudonyms such as Salder Bupp and Orm Pludge; the most frequently appearing "contributor" is "that learned and ingenious cleric, Father Gassalasca Jape, S.J., whose lines bear his initials".
In 1967, an expanded version of The Devil's Dictionary was published, following extensive research by Ernest J. Hopkins. This version included the definitions which had been left out by Bierce when his Collected Works were compiled, due to the fact that he was compiling it in Washington, D.C.
but many of the entries were in San Francisco and unavailable following the earthquake of 1906
. This updated version adds 851 definitions to the 1,000 which appeared in versions published in Bierce's lifetime; in particular, it includes the words preceding "Abasement" which were originally defined in the Demon's Dictionary.
Various editions are currently in print including ISBN 0-19-512627-0, by Oxford University Press, and ISBN 0-8203-2401-9. It is also available online through Project Gutenberg
as well as through Wiktionary
, a freely editable dictionary. The Enlarged Devil's Dictionary is in print in the Penguin Classics series, as ISBN 0-14-118592-9.
In 2000, S. T. Joshi
and David E. Schultz published The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary (ISBN 0-8203-2196-6), including previously uncollected, unpublished and alternative entries, restoring definitions dropped from previous editions and removing almost 200 wrongly attributed to Bierce. 14 Dec 2009 this work was brought out in paperback.
) A statesman
who is enamoured of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal
, who wishes to replace them with others.
Cynic : (n.) A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be. Hence the custom among the Scythians of plucking out a cynic's eyes to improve his vision.
Gas meter
: (n.) The family liar in the basement.
Lawyer
: (n.) One skilled in circumvention of the law.
Marriage
: (n.) A household consisting of a husband, a wife, and two slaves, making in all, two.
Youth
: (n.) The Period of Possibility, when Archimedes
finds a fulcrum, Cassandra
has a following and seven cities compete for the honor of endowing a living Homer
.
The Wickedicionary explicitly marks the 100th anniversary of Bierce's 1911 title The Devil's Dictionary. Both the Chamber's Gigglossary and the Wickedictionary have the additional feature that reader contributions are included.
Satire
Satire is primarily a literary genre or form, although in practice it can also be found in the graphic and performing arts. In satire, vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, and society itself, into improvement...
"reference" book written by Ambrose Bierce
Ambrose Bierce
Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce was an American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist and satirist...
. The book offers reinterpretations of terms in the English language, lampooning cant and political doublespeak
Doublespeak
Doublespeak is language that deliberately disguises, distorts, or reverses the meaning of words. Doublespeak may take the form of euphemisms , making the truth less unpleasant, without denying its nature. It may also be deployed as intentional ambiguity, or reversal of meaning...
, as well as other aspects of human foolishness and frailty. It was originally published in 1906 as The Cynic's Word Book before being retitled in 1911. Modern "unabridged" versions that include Bierce "definitions" that were for various reasons missed by earlier editions continue to be popular a century later.
Origins
The origins of the Devil's Dictionary can be traced to when Ambrose BierceAmbrose Bierce
Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce was an American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist and satirist...
was a columnist in the San Francisco-based News Letter, a small weekly financial magazine which had been founded by Frederick Marriott
Frederick Marriott
Frederick Marriott was an early aviation pioneer and creator of the Avitor Hermes Jr. which was the first unmanned aircraft to fly under its own power in the United States...
in the late 1850s. The News Letter, although a serious magazine aimed at businessmen, contained a page set aside for informal satirical content, entitled The Town Crier. Bierce was hired as this page's editor in December 1868, writing with satire, irreverence and a lack of inhibition, thus becoming known as the 'laughing devil' of San Francisco.
Although the origins of the Devil's Dictionary are normally placed in 1881 (the point at which Bierce himself said it began) the idea started in August 1869 when Bierce, short of topics to write about and having recently bought a new copy of Webster's Unabridged dictionary, suggested the possibility of writing a
Vicegerent
Vicegerent is the official administrative deputy of a ruler or head of state: vice + gerere .-Related usage:*The Byzantine Emperors held as a title "God's Vicegerent on Earth"....
s and italicised the section,
Kings are sometimes called God's vicegerents. It is to be wished they would always deserve the appellation
He then suggested how Noah Webster
Noah Webster
Noah Webster was an American educator, lexicographer, textbook pioneer, English spelling reformer, political writer, editor, and prolific author...
might have used his talent in a comic form and it was here that the idea of a Comic Dictionary was born.
The idea manifested itself in 1875 when Bierce, who had resigned at the Town Crier and had spent three years in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
, returned to San Francisco in the hope of regaining his earlier journalistic post in the News Letter. He sent two submissions to the editor of the News Letter, both written under aliases, one of which was entitled The Demon's Dictionary and contained 48 words with new definitions in Bierce's trademark style of acerbic wit. Although forgotten by Ambrose Bierce in his compiling of the Devil's Dictionary, these entries were made available in the Enlarged Devil's Dictionary, which was first published in 1967.
Early development
The Devil's Dictionary did not reappear in Bierce's next column ("Prattle," in the magazine The ArgonautThe Argonaut
The Argonaut was a literary journal based in San Francisco, California that ran from 1877 to 1893, founded and published by Frank M. Pixley. The magazine was known for containing strong political Americanism combined with art and literature...
, of which he had become an editor in March 1877). Nevertheless, he used the idea of comic definitions in his columns dated November 17, 1877, and September 14, 1878.
It was in early 1881 that Bierce first used the title, The Devil's Dictionary, while editor-in-chief of another weekly San Francisco magazine, The Wasp
The Wasp (magazine)
The Wasp was founded as a weekly satire magazine by the Bohemian expat Francis Korbel and his two brothers in San Francisco in 1876. The magazine was somewhat unique at the time, owing to the Korbels' expertise in mass-producing color lithographs in print, a process they had come to master in their...
. The "dictionary" proved popular, and during his time in this post (1881–86) he included 88 installments, each of 15-20 new definitions.
In 1887 Bierce became an editor in The Examiner
The San Francisco Examiner
The San Francisco Examiner is a U.S. daily newspaper. It has been published continuously in San Francisco, California, since the late 19th century.-19th century:...
and featured "The Cynic's Dictionary," which was to be the last of his "dictionary" columns until they reappeared in 1904, when they continued erratically before finishing in July 1906.
A number of the definitions are accompanied by satiric verses, many of which are signed with comic pseudonyms such as Salder Bupp and Orm Pludge; the most frequently appearing "contributor" is "that learned and ingenious cleric, Father Gassalasca Jape, S.J., whose lines bear his initials".
Publication
What had started as a newspaper serialization was first reproduced in book form in 1906 under the dubious title The Cynic's Word Book. Published by Doubleday, Page and Company, this contained definitions of 500 words in the first half of the alphabet (A-L). A further 500 words (M-Z) were published in 1911 in Volume 7 of The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, this time under the name of The Devil's Dictionary. This was a name much preferred by Bierce and he claimed the earlier 'more reverent' title had been forced upon him by the religious scruples of his previous employer.In 1967, an expanded version of The Devil's Dictionary was published, following extensive research by Ernest J. Hopkins. This version included the definitions which had been left out by Bierce when his Collected Works were compiled, due to the fact that he was compiling it in Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....
but many of the entries were in San Francisco and unavailable following the earthquake of 1906
1906 San Francisco earthquake
The San Francisco earthquake of 1906 was a major earthquake that struck San Francisco, California, and the coast of Northern California at 5:12 a.m. on Wednesday, April 18, 1906. The most widely accepted estimate for the magnitude of the earthquake is a moment magnitude of 7.9; however, other...
. This updated version adds 851 definitions to the 1,000 which appeared in versions published in Bierce's lifetime; in particular, it includes the words preceding "Abasement" which were originally defined in the Demon's Dictionary.
Various editions are currently in print including ISBN 0-19-512627-0, by Oxford University Press, and ISBN 0-8203-2401-9. It is also available online through Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, to "encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks". Founded in 1971 by Michael S. Hart, it is the oldest digital library. Most of the items in its collection are the full texts of public domain books...
as well as through Wiktionary
Wiktionary
Wiktionary is a multilingual, web-based project to create a free content dictionary, available in 158 languages...
, a freely editable dictionary. The Enlarged Devil's Dictionary is in print in the Penguin Classics series, as ISBN 0-14-118592-9.
In 2000, S. T. Joshi
S. T. Joshi
Sunand Tryambak Joshi — known as S. T. Joshi — is an award-winning Indian American literary critic, novelist, and a leading figure in the study of Howard Phillips Lovecraft and other authors of weird and fantastic fiction...
and David E. Schultz published The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary (ISBN 0-8203-2196-6), including previously uncollected, unpublished and alternative entries, restoring definitions dropped from previous editions and removing almost 200 wrongly attributed to Bierce. 14 Dec 2009 this work was brought out in paperback.
Examples
Conservative : (n.Noun
In linguistics, a noun is a member of a large, open lexical category whose members can occur as the main word in the subject of a clause, the object of a verb, or the object of a preposition .Lexical categories are defined in terms of how their members combine with other kinds of...
) A statesman
Statesman
A statesman is usually a politician or other notable public figure who has had a long and respected career in politics or government at the national and international level. As a term of respect, it is usually left to supporters or commentators to use the term...
who is enamoured of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal
Liberalism
Liberalism is the belief in the importance of liberty and equal rights. Liberals espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but generally, liberals support ideas such as constitutionalism, liberal democracy, free and fair elections, human rights,...
, who wishes to replace them with others.
Cynic : (n.) A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be. Hence the custom among the Scythians of plucking out a cynic's eyes to improve his vision.
Gas meter
Gas meter
A gas meter is used to measure the volume of fuel gases such as natural gas and propane. Gas meters are used at residential, commercial, and industrial buildings that consume fuel gas supplied by a gas utility. Gases are more difficult to measure than liquids, as measured volumes are highly...
: (n.) The family liar in the basement.
Lawyer
Lawyer
A lawyer, according to Black's Law Dictionary, is "a person learned in the law; as an attorney, counsel or solicitor; a person who is practicing law." Law is the system of rules of conduct established by the sovereign government of a society to correct wrongs, maintain the stability of political...
: (n.) One skilled in circumvention of the law.
Marriage
Marriage
Marriage is a social union or legal contract between people that creates kinship. It is an institution in which interpersonal relationships, usually intimate and sexual, are acknowledged in a variety of ways, depending on the culture or subculture in which it is found...
: (n.) A household consisting of a husband, a wife, and two slaves, making in all, two.
Youth
Youth
Youth is the time of life between childhood and adulthood . Definitions of the specific age range that constitutes youth vary. An individual's actual maturity may not correspond to their chronological age, as immature individuals could exist at all ages.-Usage:Around the world, the terms "youth",...
: (n.) The Period of Possibility, when Archimedes
Archimedes
Archimedes of Syracuse was a Greek mathematician, physicist, engineer, inventor, and astronomer. Although few details of his life are known, he is regarded as one of the leading scientists in classical antiquity. Among his advances in physics are the foundations of hydrostatics, statics and an...
finds a fulcrum, Cassandra
Cassandra
In Greek mythology, Cassandra was the daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba of Troy. Her beauty caused Apollo to grant her the gift of prophecy...
has a following and seven cities compete for the honor of endowing a living Homer
Homer
In the Western classical tradition Homer , is the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and is revered as the greatest ancient Greek epic poet. These epics lie at the beginning of the Western canon of literature, and have had an enormous influence on the history of literature.When he lived is...
.
-
- Youth is the true SaturnianSaturnian (poetry)Saturnian meter or verse is an old Latin and Italic poetic form, of which the principles of versification have become obscure. Only 132 complete uncontroversial verses survive. 95 literary verses and partial fragments have been preserved as quotations in later grammatical writings, as well as 37...
Reign, the Golden AgeGolden AgeThe term Golden Age comes from Greek mythology and legend and refers to the first in a sequence of four or five Ages of Man, in which the Golden Age is first, followed in sequence, by the Silver, Bronze, and Iron Ages, and then the present, a period of decline...
on earth again, when figs are grown on thistles, and pigs betailed with whistles and, wearing silken bristles, live ever in clover, and cows fly over, delivering milk at every door, and Justice is never heard to snore, and every assassin is made a ghost and, howling, is cast into BaltimostBaltimoreBaltimore is the largest independent city in the United States and the largest city and cultural center of the US state of Maryland. The city is located in central Maryland along the tidal portion of the Patapsco River, an arm of the Chesapeake Bay. Baltimore is sometimes referred to as Baltimore...
! —PolydoreCymbelineCymbeline , also known as Cymbeline, King of Britain or The Tragedy of Cymbeline, is a play by William Shakespeare, based on legends concerning the early Celtic British King Cunobelinus. Although listed as a tragedy in the First Folio, modern critics often classify Cymbeline as a romance...
Smith
- Youth is the true Saturnian
Other dictionaries in the style of Bierce
Since Bierce's publication of the Devil's Dictionary, it has created a legacy in that a number of modernized variants have appeared. Inspired by Bierce, they both update and extend the collection of satirical definitions. In chronological order, these include:- Evan EsarEvan EsarEvan Esar was an American humorist who wrote Esar's Comic Dictionary 1943, "Humorous English" in 1961, and 20,000 Quips and Quotes in 1968...
, Esar's Comic Dictionary, Harvest House, 1943. - Leonard RossiterLeonard RossiterLeonard Rossiter was an English actor known for his roles as Rupert Rigsby, in the British comedy television series Rising Damp , and Reginald Iolanthe Perrin, in The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin...
, Devil's Bediside Book, Hamlyn, 1980, ISBN 0600201058. - Rick BayanRick BayanRichard Paul Bayan is a U.S. author, webmaster and advertising copywriter, best known for his advertising thesaurus Words That Sell, his trenchant satirical lexicon, The Cynic's Dictionary, and his darkly humorous online essays....
, The Cynic's Dictionary, Hearst Books, 1994, ISBN 0785817131. - Chamber's Gigglossary, Chambers, 2008, ISBN 0550104143.
- Derek AbbottDerek AbbottDerek Abbott is a physicist and electronic engineer. He is a Professor of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Adelaide, Australia...
, Wickedictionary, CreateSpace, 2011, ISBN 1463668260.
The Wickedicionary explicitly marks the 100th anniversary of Bierce's 1911 title The Devil's Dictionary. Both the Chamber's Gigglossary and the Wickedictionary have the additional feature that reader contributions are included.
External links
- The Devil's Dictionary at Dict.org (query form)
- The Devil's Dictionary, audio and text.
- Hayward's Unabridged Dictionary, "in the style of."
- The original Devil's Dictionary