The Devil's Dictionary (Illustrated)

★ Written by Ambrose Bierce
★ Illustrated by V. Subhash
★ Looks like any new dictionary (modern fonts, two-column pages, starting/ending words at the top of every page)

Introduction

I first read about Ambrose Bierce and his "devil's dictionary" in the Young World Saturday supplement of The Hindu newspaper. That was back when I was in school. More than a decade ago, I came across an all-text version of the dictionary on the Internet. To make it more usable, I compiled it into a PDF ebook. In 2020, after I started publishing books as a real author, I decided to illustrate the book. It will be available for sale soon. The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce is a great repository of brutally frank and unusually cynical descriptions for popular words and phrases in English. Initially, it appeared piecemeal in his California newspaper and was later compiled into a volume in his collected works. He was a writer of supernatural stories in the tradition of Edgar Allan Poe. His stories were published in two volumes: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1892) and Can Such Things Be? (1893). The last we know of him was when he travelled to strife-torn Mexico in 1913. The Devil's Dictionary remains his most famous work.

Illustrated 2020 Version

This illustrated 2020 version by me:

• uses the original text by Bierce in its unabridged form
  • including the errors and foreign-language text from the printed version
  • excluding instances of '[sic]' (but marked in grayscale) and some
  • errors found in the Project Guttenberg extract
  • excluding three words involving Islamic faith (strictly for health reasons)
  • reordering of two out-of-order words
• has 17 extremely funny caricatures featuring Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Bill Gates, Don Lemon, Elon Musk, Joe Biden, Tedros Adhanom... meeting the Devil
• has the easy-on-the-eye look of any new dictionary
  • modern fonts
  • two-column pages
  • starting and ending words in the header and footer of each page
• has 160 pages

Notes

• Attributions: Most of the names attributed to quotations and written works in the dictionary by Bierce are not real.
• WARNING: If you consider yourself as a woke, liberal, Leftie, Progressive, Socialist, Communist, Feminist... then this book is not for you. This book by Bierce is a product of its time and may not match your unrealistic expectations. Maybe, you could gift it to your (fr)enemies. They might like it.

• Sample Definitions:

  • ALLIANCE, n. In international politics, the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply inserted in each other's pockets that they cannot separately plunder a third.
  • BRIDE, n. A woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her.
  • CLAIRVOYANT, n. A person, commonly a woman, who has the power of seeing that which is invisible to her patron, namely, that he is a blockhead.
  • DEBAUCHEE, n. One who has so earnestly pursued pleasure that he has had the misfortune to overtake it.
  • EXTINCTION, n. The raw material out of which theology created the future state.
  • FEMALE, n. One of the opposing, or unfair, sex.
  • GUILLOTINE, n. A machine which makes a Frenchman shrug his shoulders with good reason.
  • HAPPINESS, n. An agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another.
  • IGNORAMUS, n. A person unacquainted with certain kinds of knowledge familiar to yourself, and having certain other kinds that you know nothing about.

Free PDF Sample

This sample is a low-resolution watermarked PDF but it is fully functional.

Download
the-devil-s-dictionary-ambrose-bierce-ebook.pdf
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