About this project

Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases was compiled by Colonel Henry Yule and Arthur Coke Burnell and first published in 1886. A second, expanded edition edited by William Crooke appeared in 1903. It remains one of the most fascinating dictionaries ever written — part etymology, part colonial history, part detective story.

The title itself is a prime example of the phenomenon it documents: a British soldier's mangling of the Shi'a lament Y' Ḥasan! Y' Ḥusain!, heard at Muharram processions and rendered, phonetically, as “Hobson-Jobson.”

The text

The original 1886 work is in the public domain. The text used here is from the Project Gutenberg edition (#58529), which reproduces the Crooke 1903 edition. 2,363 entries and 11,069 dated historical citations were parsed from the HTML source.

The project

This site is an open exploration of the dictionary — daily word posts, AI-assisted etymology, and a searchable archive. The source data and parsing scripts are available on GitHub.