The Devil's Dictionary

The Devil's Dictionary is a corrosively witty lexicon in which ordinary words are redefined to expose the hypocrisies of politics, religion, marriage, war, business, and literary culture. Composed in brief aphoristic entries, many first published in newspapers, it transforms the reference book into an instrument of satire. Its style is epigrammatic, paradoxical, and mordantly comic, belonging to the tradition of Swiftian invective while distinctly reflecting the skeptical energies of late nineteenth-century America. Ambrose Bierce, Civil War veteran, journalist, and master of the macabre, brought to the work a hard-earned distrust of cant, sentimentality, and public virtue. His battlefield experience sharpened his sense of human brutality, while decades in San Francisco journalism trained him in compression, polemic, and fearless ridicule. The book gathers the outlook that made him notorious: language is never innocent, and definitions can be weapons. Readers who value satire as intellectual discipline will find this book inexhaustible. It is best read slowly, entry by entry, for its precision, surprise, and moral abrasion. For students of American literature, humor, or cultural critique, Bierce's dictionary remains a brilliant antidote to complacency.