The following list of slang terms is drawn from a book compiled by the first New York City Police Chief, George W. Matsell, in 1859. Vocabulum, or the Rogue’s Lexicon, which you can read in full text via the Internet Archive, includes an index of criminals’ slang with definitions, short stories written using the “language,” and appendices cataloging the specialized slang of gamblers, billiard players, brokers, and pugilists.
As Matsell’s 1877 obituary in The New York Times describes, the chief helmed the first attempt at organized law enforcement in the city, standardizing and professionalizing police work. Matsell was forced out of office for a short time in the late 1850s, at which time he wrote and published the Rogue’s Lexicon. He eventually returned to public service, becoming the first New York City Police Commissioner.
Matsell wrote in his preface that he intended the book to help police officers crack the code of criminal language, which, he wrote, “is calculated
to mislead and bewilder, so that rogues might still converse in the presence of an officer, and he be ignorant of what they said.” At the same time, given Matsell’s later editorship of the National Police Gazette — a periodical that titillated its readers with crime stories, while pretending to inform — it seems likely that the book might have found some casual readers fascinated by criminal ways.
