This chapter examines how lexicographers symbolically policed the borders of English not only by distancing same-sex practices from English society but by disbarring words for those practices from the English language. Though terms for women who had sex with women existed in other Early Modern English text types (and in the bilingual dictionaries that influenced early monolingual lexicographers), they were barely acknowledged in hard-word and general dictionaries. Sexuality between men, though initially well-represented, was also excised by many general lexicographers in the wake of Samuel Johnson, reflecting a growing concern that dictionaries should record only ‘proper’ English. Acts that were inadmissible in polite lexicography would partially re-emerge in dictionaries of criminal cant, which encoded an earthy alternative vocabulary for the men associated with London’s molly houses during the eighteenth century. However, even cant dictionaries would edge carefully around the existence of intimacy between women. And as dictionaries of the underworld gave way to those of fashionable slang in the nineteenth century, unnatural sex of any sort was once again thrust beyond the pale.

In keeping with its character as evasive and subversive language, slang is hard to define. Some see it as urban masculine vocabulary focused on sex, intoxication, and excretion; others as instrumentally valuable in the construction of in- and out-groups, or as a matter of style to facilitate fitting in and standing out. This chapter traces the history of slang dictionaries from the first slang dictionary of 1699, written by the semi-anonymous ‘B. E.’, to the work of other slang lexicographers throughout the centuries: Francis Grose, John Camden Hotten, John Stephen Farmer, William Ernest Henley, Eric Partridge, Jonathan Lighter, and Jonathan Green.