For as long as mankind has had to work for a living, people who work have disparaged those who prefer not to. This glossary playfully explores the etymology and history of hundreds of idler-specific terms and phrases, while offering a foundation for a new mode of thinking about work and labor.

When The Idler's Glossary was released in October 2008 the world was on the cusp of experiencing its greatest economic collapse since the Great Depression. Depending on your sense of irony, this was either foolhardy or prescient. The Wage Slave's Glossary, a second volume of anti-economic etymology, comes as we climb out of recession, and continues to explore and challenge the interconnected world of work and leisure and labor and how the language we use continues to keep us in chains.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1867.