BBC Culture celebrates the man who revelled in the vulgar tongue. He was a muse to Robert Burns; a soldier with a penchant for port; and an ‘antiquarian Falstaff’ who took midnight walks ...

These 17 synonyms for sex were used often enough in 19th-century England to earn a place in the 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, a book for upper-crust Britons who had no idea what members of ...

The slang word fly was in use in London two hundred years ago, and is recorded in the third edition of Francis Grose’s “Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue” from 1811: “FLY ...

The choice of title is a nod to one of his great predecessors: In his 20s, he encountered Francis Grose’s “A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue,” which appeared in 1785, and he has ...

The word appeared among 4,000 vulgarities in Captain Francis Grose’s “Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue,” first published in 1785. The definition was “a nasty word for a nasty thing.” ...

The phrase first appeared nearly 100 years later in a 1796 tome titled “Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue.” Sounds modern? It’s not. It can be traced to 18th-century Britain and poet ...