Definition of ARGOT

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We borrowed argot from French in the mid-1800s, although our language already had several words covering its meaning. There was jargon, which harks back to Anglo-French by way of Middle English (where it meant "twittering of birds"); it had been used for specialized (and often obscure or pretentious) vocabulary since the 1600s. There was also lingo, which had been around for almost a hundred years, and which is connected to the Latin word lingua ("language"). English novelist and lawyer Henry Fielding used it of "court gibberish" - what we tend to call legalese. In fact, the suffixal ending -ese is a newer means of indicating arcane vocabulary. One of its very first applications at the turn of the 20th century was for "American 'golfese.'"

Examples of argot in a Sentence

groups communicating in their own secret argots used the argot of figure skaters

Recent Examples on the Web And then there’s his inborn ear for every shade of human babble, here a transcendent four-hander, there a screwball travelogue, everywhere argot and idiolect and argument. — New York Times, "What if, Instead of the Internet, We Had Xenobots?," 23 Apr. 2020 The term is an example of a curious upstairs-downstairs argot in what is at its core a working-class sport. — Michael Powell, New York Times, "At Tour de France, Rules of the Road Are Often Unspoken," 25 July 2019 In today’s argot, Michelangelo’s ignudi are ripped. — Steven Litt, cleveland, "Michelangelo’s genius revealed in ‘Mind of the Master’ at Cleveland Museum of Art," 22 Sep. 2019 This is a poem rendered in rough and rowdy seaman’s argot, about a petty officer dying in his hammock. — Colin Fleming, Washington Post, "Celebrating Herman Melville, the poet," 26 Aug. 2019 Even the distinctive accent and argot of East Los Angeles has roots there, according to ethnolinguists. — Gustavo Arellano, Los Angeles Times, "For Mexican Americans, El Paso is a beacon. That makes racist massacre more devastating," 7 Aug. 2019 Among the war’s contributions to the American argot was that of the teetotaling secretary of the Navy, Josephus Daniels. — Roger Lowenstein, WSJ, "‘The Great War in America’ Review: A Country at War With Itself," 21 Dec. 2018 Instead of a clubhouse on the beach, there’s a virtual global juvenile hall, where kids gather, invent an argot, adopt alter egos, and shoot one another down. — Nick Paumgarten, The New Yorker, "How Fortnite Captured Teens’ Hearts and Minds," 14 May 2018 In the traditional account of this process, a creole most often arose from a pidgin: a simple, improvised argot drawing most of its words from the (usually European) languages of the masters. — The Economist, "JohnsonThe painful origins of many creole languages," 1 Feb. 2018

These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'argot.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.