Pronounced: ah-HAWK-ruh-see, noun
Notes: You might get close to the meaning… my reference shows two definitions, one more positive than the other
Yesterday’s word
The word argot means “an often more or less secret vocabulary and idiom peculiar to a particular group”
First usage
This word came into English in the mid-1800s
Background / Comments
This word came from France. Similar words are
- jargon; it came from Middle English and meant “twittering of birds” and came there from Anglo-French. It’s usually used for specialized (possibly obscure or pretentious) vocabulary since the 1600s
- lingo; it came from Latin lingua (language) and has been around since the early 1900s. One lawyer used this word to mean “court gibberish” (we call it “legalese”)
Richard's Vocabulary Word-of-the-Day 