“Jabberwocky” is a seven-stanza nonsense ballad by Lewis Carroll. In it, a young hero hunts down and kills a monster called the Jabberwock, and most of the story is told in words Carroll made up.
The Jabberwocky poem first appeared in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, the sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and its full text is in the public domain.
Readers who have never met the word “brillig” can still follow the story from the warning to the victory, and that is the effect Carroll was after.
Below, you’ll find the complete text first. After it comes a summary, the definitions Carroll did and did not give for his invented words, a stanza-by-stanza reading, and notes on reading the poem aloud.
Jabberwocky Poem Text in Full
Carroll’s poem was published more than 150 years ago, so the complete text is in the public domain. It is reproduced below as it appears in Through the Looking-Glass.
If you want the whole book on your phone or e-reader, Project Gutenberg offers a free Through the Looking-Glass ebook in EPUB, Kindle, and plain-text formats. That is a more reliable copy than an unofficial PDF of uncertain accuracy.
’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.
Public domain. Text from Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass (1871). Some modern printings differ slightly in punctuation.
Jabberwocky Poem Meaning Line by Line
Stanzas One and Seven: The Frame
The poem opens at four in the afternoon on the grass around a sundial.
Toves spin and bore holes, borogoves look miserable, and lost green pigs make their bellowing, whistling noise.
Nothing in the scene threatens anyone, it is a busy world running on its own logic.
When Carroll repeats this stanza at the close, he places the whole adventure inside an afternoon that carries on unchanged.
The hero’s victory matters to his family but not to the creatures on the wabe.
Some readers connect this tidy symmetry to Carroll’s day job as a mathematics lecturer at Christ Church, Oxford, though he never said so himself.
Stanzas Two and Three: The Warning and the Search
The father’s warning names three dangers: the Jabberwock with its biting jaws and catching claws, the Jubjub bird, and the “frumious” Bandersnatch.
The phrasing carries the weight of advice in folk tales, where an elder lists the perils before a young person leaves home.
The son arms himself and searches for a “long time,” then stops under the Tumtum tree to think. That still moment sets up the surprise in the next stanza.
Stanzas Four to Six: The Fight and the Homecoming
While the hero stands “in uffish thought,” the Jabberwock arrives, eyes burning, whiffling through the tulgey wood and burbling as it comes.
The fight takes two lines: “One, two! One, two!” counts out the strokes, and “snicker-snack” gives the sound of the blade.
The hero goes “galumphing” home with the head, and the father greets him with “O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!” and a chortle.
Ending a monster battle on a chortle rather than a solemn feast keeps the tone affectionate and slightly comic, and that sets up a practical point about how the poem sounds.
What Is the Jabberwocky Poem About?
“Jabberwocky” tells a plain quest story. A father warns his son about the Jabberwock and two other dangerous creatures.
The son takes up a “vorpal” sword and searches for the monster.
When it bursts out of the woods, he kills it, then carries its head home to a delighted father. The opening stanza then repeats word for word.
Repeating the first stanza at the end closes the story in a loop.
The hero’s deed matters to his household, but the strange creatures of the opening scene carry on exactly as before.
Students working through the poem for class can mark those five stages in the margins using our guide on how to annotate a poem.
Before the harder question of what the words mean, though, it helps to know where the poem sits in Carroll’s work, because that context clears up the most common confusion about it.
Where Jabberwocky Appears in the Alice Books
Many readers look for Jabberwocky in Alice in Wonderland, but the poem is not in Carroll’s 1865 novel.
It appears in the sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. Macmillan published the sequel in December 1871, although its title page carries the date 1872.
In Chapter I, “Looking-Glass House,” Alice finds a book whose first stanza is printed backward. She realizes it is a looking-glass book and holds it up to a mirror to read it.
Afterward she admits that the poem fills her head with ideas she can’t quite name, and she settles on the one thing she is sure of: somebody killed something.
Five chapters later she meets Humpty Dumpty, the egg from the full Humpty Dumpty nursery rhyme, who offers to explain the opening stanza word by word.
The poem is older than the novel. Carroll wrote the first stanza in 1855 for Mischmasch, a homemade magazine he produced to amuse his family, under the mock-scholarly title “Stanza of Anglo-Saxon Poetry.”
He finished the remaining stanzas later, during a stay with relatives at Whitburn, near Sunderland.
Film has added to the mix-up. Tim Burton’s 2010 Alice in Wonderland borrowed the Jabberwock and the vorpal sword for its final battle, so many people now link the creature to the first Alice book.
What Carroll’s Invented Words Mean
Carroll left behind more explanation than most readers realize.
It is spread across Humpty Dumpty’s speech, his 1855 notes, a letter, and a later preface.
He also admitted that some of the words had no fixed meaning, even to him.
Words Carroll Defined:
| Word | Meaning Carroll Gave | Where It Comes From |
| Brillig | Four o’clock in the afternoon, when you start broiling things for dinner | Humpty Dumpty, Chapter VI |
| Slithy | Lithe and slimy | Humpty Dumpty |
| Toves | Creatures something like badgers, lizards, and corkscrews | Humpty Dumpty |
| Gyre / Gimble | To go round like a gyroscope / to make holes like a gimlet | Humpty Dumpty |
| Wabe | The grass plot around a sundial | Humpty Dumpty |
| Mimsy | Flimsy and miserable | Humpty Dumpty |
| Borogove | A thin, shabby bird with feathers sticking out like a live mop | Humpty Dumpty |
| Mome rath | A green pig that has lost its way (“mome” possibly short for “from home”) | Humpty Dumpty |
| Outgrabe | A sound between bellowing and whistling, with a sneeze in the middle | Humpty Dumpty |
| Frumious | “Fuming” and “furious” blended together | Preface to The Hunting of the Snark (1876) |
| Uffish | A state of mind with a gruffish voice, a roughish manner, and a huffish temper | Carroll’s 1877 letter to Maud Standen |
Three Ways to Interpret the Poem
Coming back to “Jabberwocky” with a different question each time brings out at least three readings, and none of them cancels the others.
- The quest: A young person faces danger, overcomes it, and returns home. Carroll follows that pattern step by step without breaking it.
- The language experiment: Carroll gives his invented words ordinary English endings such as -y, -ish, and -ous, and places them exactly where nouns, adjectives, and verbs belong. Readers can follow the story’s grammar and emotional shape while the vocabulary stays strange, which is why linguists still use the poem to show how much meaning sentence structure carries by itself.
- The parody: Carroll’s biographer Roger Lancelyn Green suggested the poem mocks “The Shepherd of the Giant Mountains,” a German ballad that Carroll’s cousin Menella Bute Smedley translated into English in 1846. The battle gets two lines while the celebration gets a full stanza, which gently deflates the heroic ballad’s love of slaughter and glory.
Why Jabberwocky Has Lasted More Than 150 Years
Two of the poem’s inventions left the page and entered everyday English.
Merriam-Webster’s entry for chortle dates the word to 1871 and explains it as probably a blend of “chuckle” and “snort.”
“Galumph” made the same move into standard dictionaries, and the title word “jabberwocky” is now a general term for meaningless talk.
Teachers have kept the poem alive as well. Writing for the Scottish Poetry Library, poet Claire Askew says she uses it in creative writing classes to show students that nothing is too strange to belong in a poem.
Because it gives readers enough to follow the story but leaves enough open that each reading turns up something new, it has long traveled on its own, well beyond readers of Carroll’s novel.
What Jabberwocky Shows Readers Today
The Jabberwocky poem shows that a story can work even when most of its words never existed before.
Carroll explained some of his inventions through Humpty Dumpty, his early notes, a letter, and the Snark preface, and left others, such as “vorpal” and “tulgey,” open on purpose.
The ballad shape, ABAB rhymes, and shortened final lines carry readers through the warning, the fight, and the homecoming, and the repeated opening stanza brings everyone back to the same quiet afternoon.
Scroll back up and read the full text aloud with Carroll’s pronunciation notes in mind, and you will hear how much of the meaning lives in the sound.
Frequently Asked Questions
What Is the Most Famous Line in Jabberwocky?
The lines quoted most often are the opener, “Twas brillig, and the slithy toves,” and the warning, “Beware the Jabberwock, my son!” Merriam-Webster even uses “He chortled in his joy” to illustrate the word chortle.
Is the Hero in Jabberwocky Named?
No. Carroll never names him. The father calls him only “my son” and “my beamish boy.” “Beamish” was an existing English word meaning radiant, not one of Carroll’s inventions.
What Does the Jabberwock Look Like?
Beyond flaming eyes, biting jaws, and catching claws, Carroll describes nothing. Most readers picture John Tenniel’s 1871 illustration: a winged, dragon-like beast with a long neck, clawed hands, and a waistcoat.
Did Carroll Write Other Nonsense Poems?
Yes. “The Walrus and the Carpenter” appears in Through the Looking-Glass. The Hunting of the Snark (1876) brings back the Jubjub bird and the Bandersnatch for a longer, eight-part nonsense adventure.
