The year is 1699. Darkmans is falling as your rattler toils up Shooter’s Hill from Blackheath; you can hear the horses’ laboured breathing and feel every pothole. “This is a jumble-gut-lane”, you think to yourself. Suddenly men in masks and dark cloaks step from the bushes and utter those dreaded words: “Stand and deliver!”

Fortunately you have just been reading a recent publishing sensation entitled A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew. So you are not bewildred, but know that if you keep calm and speak to the rum-padders courteously, they may relent. A few minutes later you are relieved to hear their dimber-dDamber say: “The musick’s paid” and wave the smacking-cove on.

Some 300 years later, this very book, now renamed The First English Dictionary of Slang 1699, has just been republished by the Bodleian Library, with its type and layout modernised. Opening it at random, one is plunged back into late 17th-century London, specifically the criminal underworld of narrow streets, ale-houses, and brothels, of sheds crammed with stolen goods, stinking debtors’ prisons, and public hangings.

It contains words for every kind of crime, wrongdoer and punishment. An Angler, for example, is someone who steals things through windows using a fishing rod, while a Clank-napper filches silver tankards.

In 1699 the noun ‘slang’ had yet to be coined. The secret language of thieves and rogues was known as ‘cant’ and the anonymous author of the book, known only as B.E., promised to translate canting terms in case his readers found themselves in the wrong part of town. He added that his work would also prove diverting, because then, as now, criminal activity held a special fascination for the law-abiding population.

The dictionary contains 900 canting terms and B.E. also included around 3,000 more general slang terms, and various proverbs and phrases that took his fancy. Some he gleaned from existing word-lists, but others, apparently, through first-hand research. The book is bursting with rude terms for body parts and functions, sexually-transmitted diseases and drunkenness, as well as a glorious range of insults. How satisfying to be able to call someone an insipid, a dulpickle, jobbernoll, or fustiluggs, or shout: “You are a purple dromedary! (You are a bungler or a dull fellow at thieving). It includes words and phrases like hurly-burly and elbow-grease, little changed today, and others that now have different meanings, such as mawkish: a “wallowish, ill tast”, and twitter: “to laugh much with little noise”.

The dictionary’s place in the history of lexicography, and its relationship to both the reality of criminal London and its literary representation – for example, in the plays of Thomas Dekker – is explained in an introduction by John Simpson, chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. As well as managing the huge task of producing the third edition of the OED, John has previously co-edited the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang with John Ayto, and written the introduction for The First English Dictionary 1604: Robert Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall.

“The problems with lexicography are always on the borderlines,” he explains. “The straightforward stuff is easy. But slang – the linguistic wing of youth culture – is to some extent problematic.”

When OED lexicographers are deciding which words to include in new dictionaries, it can be hard to predict which of today’s slang words will be the fad of a few months, and which will have staying power.

However, John does not see the apparently oral nature of much slang to be a particular problem because today it is often recorded in some written form on the Internet – for example, in song lyrics – and OED lexicographers will accept evidence of usage from a wide range of transient sources, including photos. Having decided that a word merits inclusion, they will also try to pin down in what context it is appropriate to use it – something called ‘register labeling’. For example, is it merely informal or actually vulgar and/or offensive?

John describes B.E.’s dictionary as both a curiosity of lexicography — because no-one ever produced anything quite like it again — and a masterpiece: “I think he was very clever in the selection and merging of his material and his colourful descriptions. There is a real sense of excitement in the language.”

l The First English Dictionary of Slang, introduction by John Simpson, is produceed by Bodleian Library Publishing at £12.99