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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 the truth to
his needs. 3. An ancient Saint George who slew the dragon Truth--hence,
any popular hero or revealer who displays his grinders.

AGRICULTURIST: One who makes his money in town and blows it in the
country.

ANGER: 1. A violent blushing and scampering up and down of the blood
upon hearing the truth about ourselves; an epileptic condition produced
by the presentation of a bill that is not yet due, just due, or overdue.
A sudden tumescence of the ego and a furious exaltation of verbal powers
upon losing a collar-button. 2. Before election, the righteous wrath of
a candidate in the presence of evils that he has invented; after
election-day, his wail in the presence of the grave he did not dig. _E.
g._, The devil (taking final leave of the Lord): "I am in anger with
thee, Sire." The Lord: "For thee, son, 't will be a long time between
heavens. So go to Hell and take thine Anger with thee."

ADMISSION: 1. To lie frankly and truthfully about something that can not
possibly incriminate you. 2. To go into a place where one is not wanted;
as, "A burglar gained admission to my house."

ADMIRATION: 1. The smile of Spite. 2. To secretly wish evil to one who
has given us pleasure. 3. A form of shamefaced flattery. 4. To murder
and go scot-free. _E. g._, "I admire him very much." "Ah, so that is the
reason he has become thoughtful!" From Bean's _Meditations of a
Vegetarian_.

AFTERWARD: A space of time in which something happens after something
else has happened, as, life, death; love, disillusion; riches, gout;
wine, headache; unselfishness, regret.

ASSEMBLY: The Pantheon of the mediocre.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY: 1. Auto-intoxication. 2. Things which no one else will
say about you, and which therefore you have to say of yourself.

APOSTLE: 1. A machine for recording a lie. 2. A person who has grown
round-shouldered from following the spoor of another. 3. A lickspittle
needed by philosophers in their business.

ALBANY: 1. A place beyond which Henry Hudson could not go. 2. The lobby
of the White House. 3. Famous in history by the biennial meetings of the
Blackmailers' Club. 4. Any place wherein a capitol is burned at a
pre-established psychological moment. (There is a famous proverb which
says, "Those who are in Albany escaped Sing Sing, and those who are in
Sing Sing were on their way to Albany.")

ATHENS: See Pericles and Aspasia.

ART: 1. The vengeance of the Ideal on the Real. 2. Anything done by a
man or a woman on paper, canvas, marble or a musical keyboard that
people pretend to understand, and sometimes buy. 3. The antithesis of
whatever becomes popular in the cultured world. 4. To cast out the
dragons of virtue and hypocrisy by committing some imaginary sin and
telling the world about it. 5. The beautiful way of doing things. 6. The
expression of a man's joy in his work. 7. A matter of hair-cut and
neckties. 8. The uplifting of the beautiful so that all may see and
enjoy. 9. The utilization of love's exhaust. 10. Love's by-product.

ART-COLLECTOR: A man who operates a morgue for things rich, rare and
precious.

ATHEIST: Any man who does not believe in himself.

ATHLETE MEX: Any man who throws the bull.

ATONEMENT: 1. Embolism of the will. 2. To raise a sin from a vice to a
virtue. 3. A borax that kills the vermin of remorse, but that can not be
relied upon to kibosh their breeding-place. 4. An immunity-bath in
preparation for transgressions to come. (Among certain religious sects,
the Day of Atonement is the day on which all gonofs line up for a fresh
start.)

ATTENTION: Concentration of the mind on whatever will ultimately put
something in the pocket; hence, in law and politics, the frame-up.


BACK: 1. That part of the body to which your friend directs his remarks
when he tells you the truth. 2. A smooth surface composed of skin and
bones which stretches between Land's End and John O'Groat's.

BAL-MASQUE: The coronation of Mephisto.

BALIVORAX: A Battle Creek Bellifiller, made from selected fidoes,
fuddies, fresh freddies, chibots and chitterlings. Ladies love it,
babies cry for it, and men who eat it are loved by the ladies who love
it who have babies who cry for it. This is the filler fidgeted for by
Juno before she weaned Hercules--who was no bottle-baby--and fed to him
afterward. Ask your Bagpiper and take no other.

BEATITUDE: A rare and evanescent mental state caused by the reception of
money that one has not earned. Synonyms: Windfall, remittance.

BEGGAR: A robber who has lost his nerve--a bandit with a streak of
yellow in his ego.

BIDDLE: The act of introducing a prizefight in a Sunday School.

BILLYSUNDAY: 1. A theological jumping-jack, jerked by financial strings.
2. Any one with a pious emotional jag. 3. Hypnosis at so much per. 4. A
person intent on saving his soul by religious rigmarole at the expense
of reason. 5. To paddle away to Paradise in an orthodox canoe, and feel
happy in the thought that most of the folks on the Big Ship are going to
Hell.

BLOOMINGDALE: A condition of mind.

BASTARD: Any man who doubts his own immaculate conception.

BEAN: A dynamic spheroid, combustible under certain conditions.

BLABERINO: Any person who tells a person something a person says about
him, which puts fishbones in the throat and brickbats in the Ostermoor
of the person told.

BOOTY: 1. Whatever belongs to somebody that really belongs to somebody
else, or whatever belongs to somebody else that really belongs to you or
ought to belong to you if it did not belong to a third party--hence,
anything at all. 2. Property in a transitional stage.

BAPTISM: Hydrocephalic abracadabra.

BARD: Anciently a poet; now a Poet-Laureate.

BOREDOM: 1. The essential nature of monogamy. 2. A period or rest
between I Did and