Hobson-Jobson.

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 about

Compiled 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.

Themes

The 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 matters

Linguists, 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 for

For word-lovers, etymology hunters, students of colonial history, and anyone who enjoys a reference book that reads like an adventure.