ever, neither ken nor
khan, but _Ker_.

LIL, a book, a letter, has passed from the Gipsies to the low "Gorgios,"
though it is not a very common word. In Rommany it can be _correctly_
applied only to a letter or a piece of paper, which is written on, though
English Gipsies call all books by this name, and often speak of a letter
as a _Chinamangri_.

LOUR or LOWR, and LOAVER, are all vulgar terms for money, and combine two
Gipsy words, the one _lovo_ or _lovey_, and the other _loure_, to steal.
The reason for the combination or confusion is obvious. The author of
the Slang Dictionary, in order to explain this word, goes as usual to the
Wallachian Gipsies, for what he might have learned from the first tinker
in the streets of London. I should remark on the word loure, that Mr
Borrow has shown its original identity with _loot_, the Hindustani for
plunder or booty.

I believe that the American word loafer owes something to this Gipsy
root, as well as to the German _laufer_ (_landlaufer_), and Mexican
Spanish _galeofar_, and for this reason, that when the term first began
to be popular in 1834 or 1835, I can distinctly remember that it meant to
_pilfer_. Such, at least, is my earliest recollection, and of hearing
school boys ask one another in jest, of their acquisitions or gifts,
"Where did you loaf that from?" A petty pilferer was a loafer, but in a
very short time all of the tribe of loungers in the sun, and disreputable
pickers up of unconsidered trifles, now known as bummers, were called
loafers. On this point my memory is positive, and I call attention to
it, since the word in question has been the subject of much conjecture in
America.

It is a very curious fact, that while the word _loot_ is unquestionably
Anglo-Indian, and only a recent importation into our English "slanguage,"
it has always been at the same time English-Gipsy, although it never rose
to the surface.

MAUNDER, to stroll about and beg, has been derived from _Mand_, the Anglo-
Saxon for a basket, but is quite as likely to have come from Maunder, the
Gipsy for "to beg." Mumper, a beggar, is also from the same source.

MOKE, a donkey, is _said_ to be Gipsy, by Mr Hotten, but Gipsies
themselves do not use the word, nor does it belong to their usual
language. The proper Rommany word for an ass is _myla_.

PARNY, a vulgar word for rain, is supposed to have come into England from
the "Anglo-Indian" source, but it is more likely that it was der