The Devil's Dictionary

The Devil's Dictionary is Ambrose Bierce's mordant lexicon of human pretension, a work in which ordinary words are redefined with corrosive wit and philosophical disenchantment. Originally published in installments and later gathered in book form, it belongs to the tradition of satirical dictionaries while also reflecting the sharpened skepticism of late nineteenth-century American realism. Its style is epigrammatic, aphoristic, and theatrically concise: each definition exposes the vanity, hypo ...