# Hobson-Jobson

> The famous Anglo-Indian glossary that traces how words like bungalow, shampoo, curry and pyjama passed from India into English, part dictionary, part treasure-house of colonial encounter.

Price: 8.00 USD · in stock

## About
Few reference books are as pleasurable to browse as this celebrated glossary, which set out to explain the strange, hybrid vocabulary that British life in India had produced.What it's aboutCompiled by Henry Yule and A. C. Burnell and first published in 1886, Hobson-Jobson is a dictionary of Anglo-Indian words and phrases, the terms that soldiers, administrators, traders and travellers absorbed from Hindi, Persian, Arabic, Tamil, Portuguese and beyond. Each entry does far more than define. It follows a word back through centuries of quotations, tracing how bungalow, juggernaut, shampoo, curry, loot and hundreds of others travelled, mutated and settled into English. The title itself is a specimen, an English mangling of an Arabic religious cry.ThemesThe book is a monument to linguistic borrowing and to the long, tangled meeting of Britain and South Asia. It shows language as a record of contact, commerce and conquest, and it carries all the assumptions of its imperial moment even as it preserves an extraordinary amount of scholarship and stray delight.Why it still mattersLinguists, historians and lexicographers still cite it, and general readers still fall into it for hours. It is a primary source on how empire reshaped the English language, and a reminder of how much of everyday speech carries the sediment of distant places.Who it's forFor word-lovers, etymology hunters, students of colonial history, and anyone who enjoys a reference book that reads like an adventure.

## Specifications
- language: en
- format: paperback