Regency Slang Glossary: 40 Terms Romance Readers Meet

Society and the Season

• The ton — fashionable high society; from the French bon ton, "good style." If you're received by the ton, you exist. If you're not, you don't.
• Beau monde — literally "the beautiful world"; an interchangeable term for the ton.
• The Season — the annual stretch (roughly spring to early summer) when society decamped to London for balls, parliament, and matchmaking.
• Almack's — the assembly rooms on King Street whose lady patronesses issued vouchers to the select few. Being refused was social death; the patronesses' word was law.
• Come out — to make a girl's formal debut into society, after which she was officially on the marriage mart.
• The Marriage Mart — society's own wry name for the Season's real business: matching portions to titles.
• On-dits — gossip; from the French for "they say." A hostess collects on-dits the way a dragon collects gold.
• The cut direct — looking someone full in the face and pointedly refusing to acknowledge them. The nuclear weapon of Regency social combat, never deployed by accident.
• High in the instep — snobbish, proud, over-conscious of rank.
• Beyond the pale — outside the boundary of acceptable behaviour; irredeemably improper.

The marriage mart

• Diamond of the first water — an exceptionally beautiful woman, from the jeweller's grading of a diamond's clarity ("water"). The Season's reigning beauty.
• Incomparable — much the same: the belle nobody else can match.
• Chit — a slightly dismissive word for a young girl, usually deployed by dowagers and exasperated heroes.
• Green girl — a naive débutante fresh from the schoolroom, easily taken in.
• Bluestocking — an intellectual woman; from the informal literary gatherings of the mid-1700s Blue Stockings Society. An insult in period, a compliment in romance.
• On the shelf — unmarried past one's freshest Seasons and presumed to be staying that way. See our full guide to the Regency spinster.
• Ape-leader — a cruel period nickname for an old maid, from the proverb that spinsters were doomed to "lead apes in hell."
• Compromised — caught in a situation that presumed intimacy (alone with a man, kissed on a terrace, discovered in the library). The standard remedy was a swift wedding, which is why half the genre's marriages start here.
• Parson's mousetrap — marriage, as viewed by the bachelors trying to avoid it.
• Leg-shackled — married; same cheerful cynicism, different metaphor.
• Banns — the public announcement of an intended marriage, read in church on three successive Sundays before the wedding could take place.
• Special license — a license from the Archbishop of Canterbury allowing a couple to skip the banns and marry at any time and place. Expensive, exclusive, and the genre's favourite way to get married by Tuesday.
• Jilted — thrown over by one's betrothed. A gentleman could not honourably break an engagement; a lady could, at cost to her reputation.

Men about town

• Rake — a charming, dissolute pleasure-seeker with a scandalous reputation; short for "rakehell." The genre's favourite hero — full history in our rake deep-dive.
• Rogue — a milder, more mischievous cousin of the rake; his sins are social rather than truly scandalous.
• Corinthian — a sporting gentleman of the first rank: a superb rider, whip, boxer, and dresser. Respectable, unlike the rake.
• Dandy — a man devoted to exquisite, understated dress in the mould of Beau Brummell, who made a career of it.
• Pink of the ton — the very height of fashion; a man at the absolute peak of style.
• Nonpareil — "without equal"; a man of unmatched elegance or skill.
• Buck — a lively, fashionable young blade, usually loud about it.
• Fop — a man whose devotion to fashion has tipped into ridiculousness. Where the dandy is restraint, the fop is excess.

Money and ruin

• Pin money — a wife's personal allowance, guaranteed in her marriage settlement and hers to spend without permission.
• Plump in the pocket — rich; flush with funds.
• Pockets to let — broke, like an empty house advertising for tenants.
• In dun territory — hounded by creditors ("duns") and sinking fast.
• Rolled up — completely ruined; finished.
• Vowels — IOUs, from the letters I-O-U. A gentleman always honoured his vowels, even when it destroyed him.
• Nabob — a man who made a vast new fortune in India; enormously rich, faintly suspect to old money, and very interesting to matchmaking mamas.

Drink, wit, and insults

• Foxed — drunk. Degrees of drunkenness were a rich field: also bosky (tipsy), in his cups (well gone), and castaway (thoroughly soused).
• Blue-devilled — gloomy, depressed; afflicted by the "blue devils."
• Gammon — nonsense, humbug; to "gammon" someone is to spin them a tale. A wild, implausible story is a Banbury tale.
• Doing it too brown — overdoing a lie or flattery past the point of believability, like over-roasted meat.
• Gudgeon / widgeon / ninnyhammer — a fool, a silly goose, and a simpleton, respectively. Regency insults ran heavily to unflattering wildlife.
• Bacon-brained — stupid; see also "cork-brained" and "buffle-headed." The era never met a compound insult it didn't like.
• All the crack — the height of fashion; what everyone stylish is wearing, driving, or reading. Also bang up to the nines.

Where this slang actually comes from

A surprising amount of it is genuinely period. Captain Francis Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785, expanded in 1811) recorded the cant of taverns, gaming hells, and the sporting world, and Boxiana-era sporting journalism added more. In the twentieth century Georgette Heyer mined these sources for her novels, kept private files of period vocabulary, and effectively selected which terms the genre would keep. That is why readers sometimes call the shared vocabulary "Heyerisms": real Regency slang, curated by one novelist and passed down through every romance writer since. When you meet a term in a modern Regency, you are usually hearing a word that travelled from a 1790s gaming hell, through Grose, through Heyer, to your e-reader — which is, frankly, a better provenance than most family heirlooms.