The Origins Of The Devil’s Dictionary
The Devil’s Dictionary, penned by Ambrose Bierce, was first begun as a weekly addition to the satire column of a prestigious and pedantic business newspaper in San Francisco, called simply the “News letter.” The paper was mainly intended for the male business class, white collar banker class men, but the paper had one section dedicated entirely to satire. This was Ambrose Bierce’s page, called “The Town Crier”and because he usually wrote with a sort of black humour without any sense of self-censorship, he was known as San Francisco’s “laughing devil”. One day, while reviewing his copy of Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, Ambrose thought to himself how interesting it might have been had Noah Webster instead employed a sense of humour while writing the dictionary. Many of the definitions found in the Devil’s Dictionary include pieces of sarcastic poetry affixed, or as the sole definition.
This inspired him to write a comic dictionary, and he used his area of the Town Crier to begin explaining certain words he thought could use a better definitive description. Some of my particular favorites can be found on a separate page of examples from the Dictionary. His first “edition” of the Dictionary, was actually an application to return to writing at his original post for the San Francisco News Letter, after he returned from London. He sent forty-eight words in, each with a new definition, and instead called it The Demon’s Dictionary. This was received apparently good naturedly, and he returned to his post, despite his resignation three years prior. He actually had forgotten the origin forty-eight words, but they were collected later and included with the original book in 1967, then published as the “Enlarged Devil’s Dictionary. The Devil’s Dictionary collected and published first as a book in 1906.