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                     THE ROYCROFT DICTIONARY


                            CONCOCTED
                               _by
                     Ali Baba and the Bunch
                               on_
                            RAINY DAYS

                           DONE INTO A
                       PRINTED BOOK BY THE
                   ROYCROFTERS AT THEIR SHOP FOR
                       THE DIVERTISEMENT OF
                          THE GLOOMSTERS
                               MCMXIV


                           COPYRIGHT 1914
                          BY ELBERT HUBBARD


ADVERTISING: The education of the public as to who you are, where you
are, and what you have to offer in way of skill, talent or commodity.
The only man who should not advertise is the man who has nothing to
offer the world in way of commodity or service.

ABEL: The first squealer.

ABHORRENCE: 1. A pronounced feeling of dislike in the presence of what
is superior or unattainable. 2. To discover one's real self and to
slander somebody or something else in revenge. 3. A form of hate that
suffers from _mal de mer_.

ASBESTOS: 1. The white-hope of the damned. 2. A specially prepared paper
upon which _The Philistine_ is printed.

ARSON: To be careless in the use of fire. (General Sherman was at times
more or less careless in the use of fire on his March to the Sea.--_Hon.
Henry W. Grady._)

AERONAUT: A person who goes up in order to come down. Hence, a meta
physician.

ABNORMAL: To have intelligence, character or genius; to be less stupid
than one's neighbor; to be better than the worst; to be one's self. _E.
g._, the writer of these lines.

ABODE: 1. A place where one cleans one's teeth and occasionally sleeps.
2. A long counter with a gutter and a rail at the bottom over which one
is served with any liquid in a glass. 3. Dwelling, fireside (obsolete in
this sense). 4. A grave.

ABNEGATION: A plan for securing the thing in the easiest and surest way.

ACADEMIC: 1. Of, or pertaining to, fossils; vegetative; parasitic; the
opposite of change, viable, evolution. 2. Relating to a society that
promotes the love of the static and the immobile. 3. Apish, parrot-like,
phonographic.

ADIEU: A prayer of thanksgiving uttered at parting.

ACQUAINTANCE: Any one we bow to politely at the opera or shake hands
with warmly in a barroom, but whom we would kick out of our homes.
Hence, any one who has refused us a loan.

ACT: 1. Thought in motion. 2. An actor who says he gets three thousand a
week.

ABYSS: 1. The measureless gulf between literature and the American
magazine. 2. The distance between a thinker and an editorial writer.

ARMY: A body of humanitarians that seeks to impress on another body of
men the beauty of non-resistance, by exterminating them.

ABORIGINE: 1. A natural, unaffected person; one who has no conscience,
who is honest, upright, and always at war. 2. A Deist, a Pantheist, who
sees God in everything and feels His presence everywhere, even in his
cannibalistic rites; hence, the first thinker in any country. 3. One who
hates civilization and the _Ladies' Hum Journal_. 4. Any one who is
mulcted, robbed, murdered, butchered, betrayed, in the name of
progress.

ANARCHIST: 1. A Christian dilettante; one who casts a shadow on tomorrow
while waiting for the Greek Kalends. 2. A mouther of sublime inanities.
3. One who maps and surveys the air and constructs dainty Utopias with
the building-blocks quarried from his unbelievable credulity. 4. In the
insane asylum of idealists, a man who imagines himself to be God. 5. A
militant bourgeois who has deserted both Rome and Reason because he can
not stand competition.

AMERICAN PLAN: A scheme for shortening human life through overeating.

ANANIAS: 1. The first ad-writer. 2. Any person who adapts