Rhyming slang and toad" (the main road) and "apples and pears (stairs), as well as many more obscure examples, e.g. "Battle of the Nile" (a tile, a vulgar term for a hat), "Duke of York" (take a walk), and "Top of Rom" (home). It remains a matter of speculation whether rhyming slang was a linguistic accident, a game, or a cryptolect developed intentionally to confuse non-locals. If deliberate, it may also have been used to maintain a sense of community, or to allow traders to talk amongst themselves in marketplaces in order to facilitate collusion, without customers knowing what they were saying,
A Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant, and Vulgar Words of two secret languages, spoken by the wandering tribes of London, the costermongers, and the patterers". It has also been published as The Slang Dictionary: Etymological, Historical, and Anecdotal. The dictionary included criminal slang, back slang, rhyming slang, and other types of slang. Its author, Hotten, included histories of some slangs (back slang and rhyming slang), a detailed bibliography, and a noted definition: Hotten's work was arguably the most important work on swears since Francis Grose's 1785 "Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue". A Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant, and Vulgar Words A Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant and Vulgar