Devil's Dictionary

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Dictionaries generally strive to be dry, informative, accurate and serious reference works. But not these.

Definitions in a Devil's Dictionary satirize either people who use terms described in it, or the terms' referents themselves. They feature many jabs, anecdotes, sometimes even made-up words or neologisms, spiced with an occasional pun. They point out how a term tends to be used in practice, as opposed to how it's supposed to be used. Needless to say, a Devil's Dictionary tends to lie on the cynical side of the Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism.

Named after Amrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary, which is the Trope Codifier of this genre. Many examples of it pay Homage to it (read: they shamelessly latch onto its popularity) by naming themselves The Devil's Dictionary of....

Compare: Personal Dictionary, Darth Wiki.

Examples of Devil's Dictionary include:

Literature

• The Devil's Dictionary, of course.
• The Philosophical Lexicon.
• The Devil's Dictionary of Economics and Finance.

Web Original

• Encyclopedia Dramatica. They even cite The Devil's Dictionary as their inspiration.
• Wikipedia's /WikiSpeak essay.
• This short blog post.
• Many entries in Urban Dictionary fall squarely into this genre.

Other media

• The Jargon File occasionally slips into this mode, but for the most part is a rather straightforward example of the dictionary genre, even if at times informal or Ha Ha Only Serious:

Microsloth Windows: /mi:krohsloth` windohz/, n. (Variants combine {Microshift, Macroshaft, Microsuck} with {Windoze, WinDOS}. Hackerism(s) for 'Microsoft Windows'. A thirty-two bit extension and graphical shell to a sixteen-bit patch to an eight-bit operating system originally coded for a four-bit microprocessor which was written by a two-bit company that can't stand one bit of competition.