Dictionnaire d'argot fin-de-siècle

A compilation of late-nineteenth-century French slang presented as a lived, documentary dictionary, offering definitions, illustrative uses, and etymological commentary. The author records vocabulary from thieves, street women, ateliers, cabarets and popular performers, emphasizing immersion in the milieus that produce these words. A prefatory discussion explains how argot forms and shifts—by deformation, substitution, suffixation and metaphor—and gives examples of derived coinages and synonymic play. Entries move between concise glosses, illustrative phraseology and occasional poetic nicknames, aiming to capture the language’s social functions and its continual, inventive mobility.