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# The Good Oil Word of the Day
- URL: https://goodoil.news/the-good-oil-word-of-the-day-335/
- Published: 2025-07-08T18:15:03.000Z
- Updated: 2025-07-08T18:15:02.000Z
- Author: David Theobald
- Tags: General, Word of the Day

The word for today is…

argot (noun):

: the language used by a particular type or group of people : an often more or less secret vocabulary and idiom peculiar to a particular group

Source : [Merriam -Webster](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/argot?ref=goodoil.news)

Etymology : We borrowed argot from French in the early 1800s, although our language already had several words covering its meaning. There was jargon, the Anglo-French ancestor of which meant "twittering of birds"; it had been used for specialised (and often obscure or pretentious) vocabulary since the 1600s. There was also lingo, from the Latin word lingua, meaning "language"; that term had been in use for more than a century. English novelist and lawyer Henry Fielding used it of "court gibberish"—what we tend to call legalese. And speaking of legalese, the suffix -ese is a newer means of indicating arcane vocabulary. One of its very first applications at the turn of the 20th century was for "American 'golfese.'"

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