A drop–money given to a beggar. Funkum–lavender or other perfume sold in envelopes. A boozer–a public-house. A slang–a hawker’s licence. A kip–a place to sleep in, or a night’s lodging. Smoke–London. A judy–a woman. The spike–the casual ward. The lump–the casual ward. A tosheroon–a half-crown. A deaner–a shilling. A hog–a shilling. A sprowsie–a sixpence. Clods–coppers. A drum–a billy can. Shackles–soup. A chat–a louse. Hard-up–tobacco made from cigarette ends. A stick or cane–a burglar’s jemmy. A peter–a safe. A bly–a burglar’s oxy-acetylene blowlamp.

To bawl–to suck or swallow. To knock off–to steal. To skipper–to sleep in the open.

About half of these words are in the larger dictionaries. It is interesting to guess at the derivation of some of them, though one or two–for instance, ‘funkum’ and ‘tosheroon’–are beyond guessing. ‘Deaner’ presumably comes from ‘denier’. ‘Glimmer’ (with the verb ‘to glim’) may have something to do with the old word ‘glim’, meaning a light, or another old word ‘glim’, meaning a glimpse; but it is an instance of the formation of new words, for in its present sense it can hardly be older than motor-cars. ‘Gee’ is a curious word; conceivably it has arisen out of ‘gee’, meaning horse, in the sense of stalking horse. The derivation of ‘screever’ is mysterious. It must come ultimately from scribo, but there has been no similar word in English for the past hundred and fifty years; nor can it have come directly from French, for pavement artists are unknown in France. ‘Judy’ and ‘bawl’ are East End words, not found west of Tower Bridge. ‘Smoke’ is a word used only by tramps. ‘Kip’ is Danish. Till quite recently the word ‘doss’ was used in this sense, but it is now quite obsolete.

London slang and dialect seem to change very rapidly. The old London accent described by Dickens and Surtees, with v for w and w for v and so forth, has now vanished utterly. The Cockney accent as we know it seems to have come up in the ’forties (it is first mentioned in an American book, Herman Melville’s White Jacket), and Cockney is already changing; there are few people now who say ‘fice’ for ‘face’, ‘nawce’ for ‘nice’ and so forth as consistently as they did twenty years ago. The slang changes together with the accent. Twenty-five or thirty years ago, for instance, the ‘rhyming slang’ was all the rage in London. In the ‘rhyming slang’ everything was named by something rhyming with it–a ‘hit or miss’ for a kiss, ‘plates of meat’ for feet, etc. It was so common that it was even reproduced in novels; now it is almost extinct.1 Perhaps all the words I have mentioned above will have vanished in another twenty years.