# The Devil's Dictionary

**Author:** Ambrose Bierce
**Tags:** English language, Vocabulary
**Price:** Free
**Formats:** DOCX, EPUB, FB2, PDF, TXT
**Downloads:** 40
**Added:** 10.07.2026
**URL:** https://samolit.com/books/95912

## Description

Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary is a wickedly subversive lexicon that turns the familiar dictionary format into a weapon of satire. Composed over three decades as barbed installments for San Francisco newspapers before appearing in book form in 1906 and again, in fuller form, in 1911, it strips away the polite fictions of everyday language to reveal the hypocrisy, vanity, and absurdity Bierce saw beneath. Politics, religion, marriage, law, and human nature itself all come under his unsparing wit, redefined with definitions that are as brief as they are devastating. A bore, a cynic, a diplomat, a Christian, a lawyer: each entry twists expectation into biting irony, exposing the gap between what people say and what they truly mean. Far from a mere joke book, it stands as one of the most audacious literary experiments in American letters, a mirror held up to society's most cherished institutions and found wanting. Sharp, irreverent, and endlessly quotable, this collection remains a landmark of American satire, offering readers a darkly comic education in the vocabulary of hypocrisy and the absurdities of civilized life.