SubscribeThis material seems old enough to be out of copyright. If so, Project Gutenberg might be interested in transcribing one or more of these books, or they may have done so already. And again, if so, it would be available as somewhat formatted ASCII suitable for trivial processing into an amusing dictionary of the kind conceived by Mark.
I'm not interested in manually typing tens of thousands of these definitions, but if that donkey work is done and someone points me at it I'm quite happy to knock together a web site where visitors can enter words or sequences thereof and get them translated. I already have hosting for various other projects, and it's no more than an hour's work I should think. A suitable contact email address is used to post this comment.
The expense and publicity entailed in the use of the telegraph are recognized as serious obstacles. This work will cause great diminution of these, in many cases practically eliminating them. Embracing as it does, social and domestic, as well as business and miscellaneous subjects, a large proportion of correspondence which is now conducted through the mails, can, through its medium, at slight expense, be conducted, confidentially and quickly, by telegraph. (Emphasis in original.)Cryptographically, it's snake oil even for the 1890s. But probably good enough to avoid casual interception.
During the late 19th-century telegraphy boom, some carriers charged extra for words longer than 15 characters and for messages longer than 10 words. Thus, the cheapest telegram was often limited to 150 characters
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posted by barnacles at 8:14 PM on August 3