Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll: Full Poem, Meaning and Glossary
The full text of Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky, what brillig, slithy and mimsy mean in Humpty Dumpty's own words, and what happens in each stanza.
Reviewed by: Hazel Max
"Jabberwocky" is a nonsense poem by Lewis Carroll, published in 1871 in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, the sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. In seven short stanzas, a father warns his son about a monster called the Jabberwock. The boy hunts it down with his "vorpal sword", cuts off its head and comes home a hero. Carroll invented most of the strange words, yet the story is easy to follow.
Below are the full poem, checked word for word against the first edition, quick facts, a glossary of the made-up words with Humpty Dumpty's own explanations, the meaning of each stanza, the poem's devices and an activity for writing your own nonsense stanza.
The full Jabberwocky poem text
In the book, Alice finds the poem in a Looking-glass book with the first verse printed backwards, so she holds it up to a mirror. This is the text from Chapter 1, "Looking-Glass House".
Jabberwocky
'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"
He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.
And as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!
One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.
"And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!"
He chortled in his joy.
'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
Checked against Project Gutenberg and the 1872 printing on Wikisource, which misprints "wabe" as "wade" in the opening stanza. Every other appearance reads "wabe".
Quick facts about the poem
| Fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Poet | Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, 1832 to 1898) |
| First written | The first stanza in 1855, as "Stanza of Anglo-Saxon Poetry" in Mischmasch, Carroll's family magazine |
| Published | 1871, in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (London: Macmillan; the title page is dated 1872) |
| Where in the book | Chapter 1, "Looking-Glass House". Humpty Dumpty explains the first stanza in Chapter 6. |
| Form | Nonsense poem that tells a hero story in quatrains |
| Length | 7 stanzas, 28 lines. The first and last stanzas are the same. |
| Rhyme scheme | ABAB in stanzas 1, 2, 4 and 7; ABCB in stanzas 3, 5 and 6, which add internal rhymes |
| Meter | Mostly iambic: three lines of tetrameter (four beats), then one of trimeter (three beats) |
| Illustrator | John Tenniel |
The short fourth line gives each stanza a drumbeat ending. The beat is the da-DUM of iambic pentameter, with four beats instead of five. It is not a strict ballad stanza, but it tells a hero story the way old ballads do. To label the rhymes yourself, see our guide to rhyme scheme.
Summary: what happens in the poem
A father warns his son about the Jabberwock. The boy hunts the monster, kills it when it bursts out of the woods, and carries its head home to his overjoyed father. The poem begins and ends with the same odd scene of creatures at play in the late afternoon.
Alice gets the plot on first reading: "Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don't exactly know what they are! However, somebody killed something: that's clear, at any rate—" Because it tells a story from start to finish, it is also a short narrative poem.
What is a Jabberwock?
The monster is the Jabberwock; "Jabberwocky" is the poem's title. The text gives it "jaws that bite", "claws that catch" and "eyes of flame". John Tenniel's picture in the book adds bat-like wings, a long neck, talons and, as a joke, a waistcoat. Carroll feared the picture was too frightening to open the book with, so he asked about thirty mothers and chose the White Knight for the frontispiece instead.
Carroll later explained the name to a school magazine in Boston: the Anglo-Saxon "wocer" or "wocor" means "offspring" or "fruit", so with "jabber" as "excited and voluble discussion", a Jabberwock is "the result of much excited discussion". Thanks to the poem, "jabberwocky" itself now means nonsense or made-up language.
Jabberwocky meaning: a glossary of the made-up words
In Chapter 6, Alice asks Humpty Dumpty to explain the poem. He only gets through the first stanza, but his answers are the closest thing to official meanings. Where neither he nor Carroll explained a word, the table gives the usual reading, marked "common reading".
| Word | Meaning | Source |
|---|---|---|
| brillig | Four o'clock in the afternoon, "the time when you begin broiling things for dinner" | Humpty Dumpty |
| slithy | "Lithe and slimy" (lithe means active) | Humpty Dumpty |
| toves | "Something like badgers", "something like lizards" and "something like corkscrews"; they nest under sundials and live on cheese | Humpty Dumpty |
| gyre | "To go round and round like a gyroscope" | Humpty Dumpty |
| gimble | "To make holes like a gimblet" (a gimlet, a small hand drill) | Humpty Dumpty |
| wabe | The grass plot round a sundial, because "it goes a long way before it, and a long way behind it" | Alice's guess, which Humpty Dumpty accepts |
| mimsy | "Flimsy and miserable" | Humpty Dumpty |
| borogoves | "A thin shabby-looking bird with its feathers sticking out all round—something like a live mop" | Humpty Dumpty |
| mome raths | A rath is "a sort of green pig". Mome may be "short for 'from home'", meaning they are lost. | Humpty Dumpty, who is "not certain" about mome |
| outgrabe | A noise "between bellowing and whistling, with a kind of sneeze in the middle" | Humpty Dumpty |
| frumious | Fuming and furious at once | Carroll, preface to The Hunting of the Snark (1876) |
| vorpal | Sharp and deadly | Common reading |
| manxome | Fearsome | Common reading |
| uffish | Gruff, huffy and lost in thought | Common reading (Carroll also explained it in an 1877 letter) |
| whiffling | Puffing in gusts; "whiffle" is an older English word | Common reading |
| tulgey | Thick, dark and tangled | Common reading |
| burbled | Bubbled and gurgled; "burble" is older than the poem | Common reading |
| snicker-snack | The sound of the blade slicing | Common reading |
| galumphing | Galloping in a heavy, triumphant way | Common reading |
| beamish | Beaming, glowing with pride | Common reading |
| frabjous | Fabulous and joyous | Common reading |
| chortled | Chuckled and snorted | Common reading |
Carroll's first glossary. His 1855 notes on the opening stanza do not always match Humpty Dumpty. There, "gyre" means "to scratch like a dog", the "wabe" is "the side of a hill", a borogove is "an extinct kind of Parrot", a rath is "a species of land turtle", "mome" means "grave" and "outgrabe" means "squeaked". His "literal English" of the stanza: "It was evening, and the smooth active badgers were scratching and boring holes in the hill-side: all unhappy were the parrots; and the grave turtles squeaked out."
Jabberwocky stanza by stanza
Here is what each of the seven stanzas says in plain English.
Stanza 1: it is late afternoon. Slimy, lively creatures spin and bore holes in the grass around a sundial. The shabby borogoves are miserable, and the lost green pigs give a whistling bellow. Nothing has happened yet: this is the odd world before the story starts.
Stanza 2: a father warns his son about the Jabberwock, with its biting jaws and grabbing claws, the Jubjub bird and the furious Bandersnatch. The warning sets up the quest, like the start of a fairy tale.
Stanza 3: the son takes his sword and searches a long time for his fearsome enemy. Tired, he rests by the Tumtum tree to think.
Stanza 4: while he stands lost in thought, the Jabberwock arrives with blazing eyes, puffing through the dark wood and burbling as it comes.
Stanza 5: the fight takes four lines. "One, two! One, two!" The blade goes "through and through" with a "snicker-snack". The boy kills the beast, takes its head and bounds home in triumph.
Stanza 6: the father welcomes him: "Come to my arms, my beamish boy!" He calls it a "frabjous day", shouts "Callooh! Callay!" and chortles for joy.
Stanza 7: the first stanza returns word for word. The toves and borogoves carry on as before, closing the poem like a picture frame. It can also suggest that the world has hardly noticed the hero's great deed.
Themes
- Growing up. A boy faces danger alone and comes home a hero: "my son" becomes "my beamish boy".
- Heroism, gently mocked. The grand style of old heroic ballads ("hast thou slain") tells a tale in made-up words. This is called mock-heroic.
- How words make meaning. "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty tells Alice, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less." The poem tests that idea: we follow it through grammar, sound and story.
Portmanteau words: why the nonsense still makes sense
A portmanteau was a travelling case that opened into two halves. Humpty Dumpty uses it to explain "slithy": "You see it's like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word." That line gave English the term portmanteau word, now used for blends like brunch and smog.
In his preface to The Hunting of the Snark, Carroll said Humpty Dumpty's theory "seems to me the right explanation for all". His example is "frumious": try to say "fuming" and "furious" at the same moment, and if you have "a perfectly balanced mind", out comes "frumious".
Not every odd word is a blend. Some are older English words (whiffling, burbled), some are sounds (snicker-snack) and some are pure invention (vorpal, tulgey). The poem still makes sense because the rest of the language does the work:
- The small words are real. "'Twas", "and", "the", "did", "in": the grammar is ordinary English.
- Endings show each word's job. Slithy and mimsy end in -y, so they describe. Toves and borogoves end in -s, so they are things. After "did", gyre and gimble must be actions.
- Sounds carry feeling. "Frumious" sounds angry and "galumphing" sounds heavy and bouncy.
- The story is familiar. Warning, quest, battle, victory, celebration: we fill in the gaps from fairy tales.
Two of Carroll's inventions, "chortle" and "galumph", are now ordinary English words.
Write your own nonsense poem, free
Literary devices in Jabberwocky
| Device | Example from the poem | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Portmanteau words | slithy, mimsy, frumious | Packs two meanings into one sound |
| Onomatopoeia | snicker-snack, burbled, whiffling | Lets you hear the monster and the fight |
| Alliteration | "gyre and gimble", "Beware the Jubjub bird", "Callooh! Callay!" | Makes the lines fun to say aloud |
| Internal rhyme | "through and through", "dead ... head", "day! Callooh! Callay!" | Speeds up the battle and the celebration |
| Parallelism | "The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!" | Makes the danger short and memorable |
| Repetition | "Beware" twice; the first stanza repeated at the end | Builds the warning and frames the story |
| Old-fashioned wording | "'Twas", "hast thou slain", "So rested he" | Sounds like an ancient ballad, which makes the nonsense funnier |
Lewis Carroll and the story behind the poem
Lewis Carroll was the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832 to 1898), a mathematics lecturer at Christ Church, Oxford. He wrote the first stanza in 1855 for Mischmasch, a homemade family magazine, and signed his mock-scholarly notes from Croft, the rectory where his family lived. As a joke, he called it "an obscure, but yet deeply-affecting, relic of ancient Poetry".
According to his nephew and first biographer, Stuart Dodgson Collingwood, Carroll finished the poem during a verse-making game with his cousins at Whitburn, near Sunderland. When Through the Looking-Glass came out, booksellers took 8,000 copies of the first edition before Carroll had even received his own, and "Jabberwocky" was at once seen as the best thing in the book. The Jubjub bird and the Bandersnatch returned in The Hunting of the Snark (1876).
Write your own nonsense stanza
The best way to understand "Jabberwocky" is to try it. This takes about 15 minutes, in class or at home.
- Pick an everyday scene and say it plainly first, for example: sleepy children come downstairs and the toaster pops.
- Choose five to eight words to replace: nouns, describing words and action words. Keep the little words (the, and, did, in).
- Blend two words for each one, the way "slithy" packs in lithe and slimy.
- Keep the endings: -y or -ish to describe, -ing or -ed for actions, -s for more than one.
- Fit Carroll's beat: three lines of four beats, then one of three. Rhyme lines 2 and 4, and 1 and 3 if you can.
- Read it aloud, then write a Humpty Dumpty glossary for your words.
The Breakfast Glumps
At dawnish, when the sleepled glumps
Came slomping down the creakly stair,
The toastler gave two scorchy jumps
And splinkled in the air.
The glossary: dawnish, the grey time before it is properly light; sleepled, sleepy + rumpled; glumps, glum + lumps (children before breakfast); slomping, slumping + clomping; creakly, creaky + crackly; toastler, toaster + butler; scorchy, a little scorched; splinkled, sprinkled + twinkled, as crumbs do in morning light.
In class, swap stanzas with a partner and guess each other's meanings before showing your glossary. If you need a starting scene, ask our free AI poem generator for a short, funny poem, then swap in your own invented words.
Turn your nonsense words into a poem
FAQs
Is "Jabberwocky" in Alice in Wonderland?
No. It is in the sequel, Through the Looking-Glass (1871); Alice's Adventures in Wonderland came out in 1865. Films often mix the two books. In Disney's 1951 Alice in Wonderland, the Cheshire Cat sings the first stanza in "'Twas Brillig", and in Tim Burton's 2010 film the monster, called the Jabberwocky, is voiced by Christopher Lee.
How do you pronounce "slithy toves" and "borogoves"?
Carroll answered this in the preface to The Hunting of the Snark. The "i" in "slithy" is long, as in "writhe". "Toves" rhymes with "groves". The first "o" in "borogoves" sounds like the "o" in "borrow".
Is there a Jabberwocky movie?
Yes. Jabberwocky (1977) is a British comedy directed by Terry Gilliam, starring Michael Palin as a cooper's apprentice forced to hunt a dragon. Jan Švankmajer's 1971 short film Jabberwocky was also inspired by the poem.
Can I print "Jabberwocky" for my class?
Yes. The poem was published in 1871 and is in the public domain, so you can print and share it freely. For a PDF, print this page and choose "Save as PDF" in your browser.
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