Jargon by field
Every trade talks in shorthand. These lists collect the terms a character in each line of work would use without stopping to explain them.
Fields
- Nautical and sailing (200 terms)
- Legal (200 terms)
- Military (200 terms)
- Medical (200 terms)
- Police and crime (200 terms)
- Aviation (200 terms)
- Theater and stage (198 terms)
- Journalism and printing (200 terms)
- Finance and trading (200 terms)
- Railways (200 terms)
- Mining (174 terms)
- Gambling and cards (200 terms)
- Horses and riding (89 terms)
- Computing (200 terms)
How the terms were chosen
Wiktionary tags each specialist sense with its field. A list keeps the terms common enough to turn up in fiction, drops the ones so common they are no longer jargon, and shows the specialist meaning rather than the everyday one: “port” on the nautical list is the left side of a ship.
Jargon works best sparingly. One exact term, used without apology, does more for a character than a paragraph of them.
Sources and licenses
-
Meanings, labels, and dates from
English Wiktionary, by way of the
kaikki.org extraction, under
CC BY-SA 4.0. The lists
derived from it are shared under the same license: read the
data notice, or copy them from
src/tools/thesaurus/generated/in the Tabularia repository. - Words are ordered by how often they appear in modern English, measured with wordfreq.