Convicts of the early colony had their own ‘flash’ language, made up of slang words developed by criminals in London.
Outsiders couldn’t understand the language, so convicts were able to undermine the authorities with their words.
Convict James Hardy Vaux documented these words in 1812 in his A vocabulary of the flash language, published in 1819. The following is a selection of words from Vaux’s dictionary, and other words in use in the early colony, that relate to the lives of the 50 Hyde Park Barracks convicts in the ‘Lags & Swells’ interactive at the Hyde Park Barracks Museum.
- bad
- a convict who cooperates with police and officials
- bellowser
- a man transported for the term of his natural life
- bit-faker
- a coiner, maker of counterfeit money
- bolter
- one who runs away or leaves a place suddenly
- boned
- taken into custody
- breech’d
- flush with money, ‘in town’
- brisket-beater
- a Roman Catholic
- bug
- nickname given to Englishmen by the Irish
- bush’d
- poor, without money
- buz cove
- a pickpocket
- buz covess
- a female pickpocket
- charley
- a watchman
- cly-faker
- a pickpocket
- cockatoo
- a convict who served a sentence on Cockatoo Island
- cracksman
- a house-breaker
- crap’d
- hanged
- croppy
- a convict (originally an Irish convict)
- darbie'd
- fettered (wearing chains or irons)
- done
- convicted
- file
- a person who has had a long course of experience in the arts of fraud
- floor'd
- so drunk as to be incapable of standing
- fly
- vigilant, cunning, not easily duped
- galloot
- a soldier
- grab'd
- taken, apprehended
- horney
- a constable
- in town
- flush with money, ‘breech’d’
- kid
- a child, but particularly a boy who begins thieving at an early age
- kinchen
- a young lad
- knuckler
- a pickpocket
- lifer
- someone transported with a life sentence
- lag
- a convict under sentence of transportation
- lagger
- a sailor
- lushy cove
- a drunken man
- lushy
- drunk, intoxicated
- mollisher
- a woman
- nibb'd
- taken into custody
- nibbler
- a pilferer or petty thief
- pall
- a partner, companion, associate or accomplice
- pebble
- a convict whose behaviour is incorrigible
- prig
- a thief
- pulled up
- taken into custody, in confinement
- queer gam’d
- bandy legged, or having otherwise deformed legs
- queer
- bad, counterfeit, false, unwell in health
- qock’d
- forgetful, absent in mind
- rump’d
- flogged or scourged
- sevener
- a convict sentenced to a term of seven years’ transportation
- scamp
- a highwayman, man who commits robbery on the highway
- scrag’d
- hanged
- scurf’d
- taken into custody
- shook
- synonymous with ‘rock’d’
- slang’d
- fettered (wearing chains or irons)
- sneaksman
- a man or boy who ‘goes upon the sneak’ (robs houses or shops)
- sharp
- a gambler, cheat or swindler
- swell
- a gentleman or any well-dressed person
- swish’d
- married
- swoddy
- a soldier
- tobyman
- a highwayman
- toddler
- an infirm elderly person
- top’d
- hanged
- ticketer
- man or woman holding a ticket of leave
- up in the stirrups
- a man who is ‘in Swell Street’, that is, having plenty of money
- vardo-gill
- waggoner