from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
noun A specialized vocabulary or set of idioms used by a particular group.
from The Century Dictionary.
noun The conventional slang of a class, originally that of thieves and vagabonds, devised for purposes of disguise and concealment; cant; slang.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
noun A secret language or conventional slang peculiar to thieves, tramps, and vagabonds; flash.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
noun A secret language or conventional slang peculiar to thieves, tramps and vagabonds.
noun The specialized informal vocabulary and terminology used between people with special skill in a field, such as between doctors, mathematicians or hackers; a jargon.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
noun a characteristic language of a particular group (as among thieves)
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
[French, from earlier argot, underworld of beggars and thieves, of unknown origin.]
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
From French argot
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Examples
And by "the peg," in the argot, is meant the place where a free meal may be obtained.
“You see?” he asked in pidgin argot; a tongue that owed something to Persian, Caerdicci and Hellene alike; zenyan, it was called, but I learned that later.
But as for "especially in popular fiction, the first criterion has to be readability",, of course that's true but to whom must it be readable; for example translating James Ellroy, or even Ken Bruen into, say, German must provide interesting problems in itself, and in such situations its at least as important for the translator to retain the rhythms and the 'argot' of the original.
It is really a sort of sublimated and apotheosized "argot," an "argot" of a kind of platonic archetypal drawing-room; such a drawing-room as has never existed perhaps, but to which all drawing-rooms or salons, if you will, of elegant conversation, perpetually approximate.
"There were certain ways of referring to things in the gang Henry was a part of (and which Eddie, as his little brother, was also a part of); the argot of their miserable little ka-tet . From Wizard and Glass by Stephen King.
5814738 commented on the word argot
"There were certain ways of referring to things in the gang Henry was a part of (and which Eddie, as his little brother, was also a part of); the argot of their miserable little ka-tet . From Wizard and Glass by Stephen King.
January 10, 2011
Louises commented on the word argot
Flora was learning how to translate the Starkadder argot. Cold Comfort Farm.
February 23, 2013