the devils dictionary

n. The body of a primitive people's beliefs concerning its origin, early history, heroes, deities and so forth, as distinguished from the true accounts which it invents later.
(also: The Devil's Dictionary)

n. A follower of Achilles — particularly when he didn't lead.

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n. An indocile horse of the western plains. In English society, the American wife of an English nobleman.

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n. An ancient Egyptian, formerly in universal use among modern civilized nations as medicine, and now engaged in supplying art with an excellent pigment. He is handy, too, in museums in gratifying the vulgar curiosity that serves to distinguish man from the lower animals.

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By means of the Mummy, mankind, it is said,
Attests to the gods its respect for the dead.
We plunder his tomb, be he sinner or saint,
Distil him for physic and grind him for paint,
Exhibit for money his poor, shrunken frame,
And with levity flock to the scene of the shame.
O, tell me, ye gods, for the use of my rhyme:
For respecting the dead what's the limit of time?
—Scopas Brune

(also: The Devil's Dictionary)

n. A crowd; the source of political wisdom and virtue. In a republic, the object of the statesman's adoration. "In a multitude of consellors there is wisdom," saith the proverb. If many men of equal individual wisdom are wiser than any one of them, it must be that they acquire the excess of wisdom by the mere act of getting together. Whence comes it? Obviously from nowhere — as well say that a range of mountains is higher than the single mountains composing it. A multitude is as wise as its wisest member if it obey him; if not, it is no wiser than its most foolish.

(also: The Devil's Dictionary)

n. Creation's afterthought; an animal that Adam did not name.

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n. A child of two races, ashamed of both.
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n. In politics one afflicted with self-respect and addicted to the vice of independence. A term of contempt.


(also: The Devil's Dictionary)

n. In man, the gateway to the soul; in woman, the outlet of the heart

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n. A long glove covering a part of the arm. Worn in New Jersey. But "mousquetaire" is a mighty poor way to spell muskeeter.

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n. An animal which strews its path with fainting women. As in Rome Christians were thrown to the lions, so centuries earlier in Otumwee, the most ancient and famous city of the world, female heretics were thrown to the mice. Jakak-Zotp, the historian, the only Otumwump whose writings have descended to us, says that these martyrs met their death with little dignity and much exertion. He even attempts to exculpate the mice (such is the malice of bigotry) by declaring that the unfortunate women perished, some from exhaustion, some of broken necks from falling over their own feet and some from lack of restoratives. The (also: mice), he avers, enjoyed the pleasures of the chase with composure. But if "Roman history is nine-tenths lying," we can hardly expect a smaller proportion of that rhetorical figure in the annals of a people capable of so incredible cruelty to lovely woman; for a hard heart has a false tongue.

(also: mice)
(also: The Devil's Dictionary)

n. A mental wolf in moral wool.


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n. A property, condition or state of matter. The existence and possibility of motion is denied by many philosophers, who point out that a thing cannot move where it is and cannot move where it is not. Others, with Galileo, say: "And yet it moves." It is not the province of the lexicographer to decide.

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How charming is divine Philosophy!
—Milton

(also: The Devil's Dictionary)

n. The spore of insomnia, as distinguished from Conscience, the bacillus of the same disease. Indigenous to New Jersey, where the marshes in which they multiply are known as meadows and the mosquitoes themselves are affirmed by the natives to be larks.

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"I am the master of all things!" Man cried.
"Then, pray, what am I?" the Mosquito replied.

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n. A kind of inlaid work. From Moses, who when little was inlaid in a basket among the bulrush.

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n. The part of immortality that we know about.


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n. The day of good deeds and a reformed life. The beginning of happiness

(also: tomorrow) when we get to it
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n. The end of night and dawn of dejection. The morning was discovered by a Chaldean astronomer, who, finding his observation of the stars unaccountably interrupted, diligently sought the cause and found it. After several centuries of disputation, morning was generally accepted by the scientific as a reasonable cause of the interruption and a constantly recurrent natural phenomenon.

(also: The Devil's Dictionary)

n. A follower of Joseph Smith, who received from an angel a revelation inscribed on brass plates and afterward revised and enlarged by his successor in the prophethood. While still an inoffensive people the Mormons were bitterly persecuted, their prophet assassinated, their homes burned and themselves driven into the desert, where they prospered, practiced polygamy and themselves took a hand in the game of persecution.
They say the Mormons are liars. They say that Joseph Smith did not receive from the hands of an angel the written revelation that we obey. Let them prove it!
—Brigham Young, Prophet and Logician.

(also: The Devil's Dictionary)

adj. Pertaining to a kind of marriage between a man of exalted rank and a woman of low degree by which the wife gets nothing but a husband, and not much of a husband. From Morgan (J. P.), a king of finance, by a transaction with whom nobody gets anything at all.

(also: The Devil's Dictionary)