Most of the time, I try to keep my own prejudices out of the reviews I write, trying to stick purely to discussing what a product’s contents are, along with some fairly objective thoughts on them. I do so because I recognize that my opinions are just that – my opinions, which likely won’t mean much to someone else with their own opinions when they read what I’ve written. As such, I attempt (with relative success) to not let these reviews become my own personal sounding boards.

However, I find that I can’t help but do just that with Empty Room Studios’ product, Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue.

Before anything else, though, let’s cover the book’s technical aspects. Weighing in at just under three hundred pages, the Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue dedicates almost all of its pages to its contents, having only two pages of ads (one at the beginning and one at the end) and the front cover. There are helpful bookmarks that link you to each alphabetical section, and notwithstanding the covers and ads, the only illustrations here are the very light grey images of intertwined vines along the sides of each page.

The major problem I had with the Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue is that, strictly speaking, it’s not a dictionary; it’s a glossary. Simply put, each page has a listing of terms (spelled out in capital letters) with the definition written after it in lowercase. Rarely, a definition will have a SEE reference to another term, or even explain the term’s derivation. But for the most part there is only page after page of terms, all listed in alphabetical order, with a sentence or two explaining what the terms mean.

That’s it. There’s no pronunciation guide, no word derivation, no part of speech indicator, no alternative spellings for how the word appears as other parts of speech, no synonyms or antonyms… no anything else that you’d find in a real dictionary. Perhaps I’m being pedantic, but that undercuts a lot of usefulness here. For example, given that all of these are slang terms that people once actually used, it’d be cool to know the derivation, as well as the time and place, that they were used so that you could tailor these to similarly-themed countries in your campaign world, lending it greater verisimilitude. But there’s none of that information here, so you can’t.

Another aspect of this book that I took issue with is how you’ll quite likely want to use it in the opposite manner from how it’s laid out. That is, I found myself with a specific definition in mind, and wanted to find slang terms for it, but being a glossary, the book is laid out via the terms, making a definition-based search difficult at best. For example, if I wanted to find a slang term for “prostitute,” I’d basically just have to read through the book until I found terms that had that as part of their definition. I was able to do a word search, but my results changed depending on if I searched “prostitute,” “hooker,” “streetwalker,” or any other similar term. This product is much more useful if you have a specific word in mind, rather than a specific meaning.

The Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue isn’t a bad book, per se. Rather, it runs up against issues that have plagued definition-based lexicons for centuries, and these sharply limit its usefulness. More could have, and I think should have, been done here – without this extra work, the resource value of this book is lessened, to the point where I think calling it a “dictionary” is giving it too much credit. Trying to make this book return the information I wanted it to often gave me a vulgar tongue, and hence the score I gave it.