27 May 2021
In current use, narc or narco refers to a law enforcement agent who investigates illegal drug use or to a police informer. Narc is also a verb meaning to inform on someone. These senses are typically analyzed as a clipping of narcotics. But there is an older, mid nineteenth-century slang term, nark, which also means an informer, and the origin of this older nark is not so clear. In the 1950s, the urge to clip narcotics to narc found an existing term already there. So, the current use of narc has its origins in both the older term and the relatively more recent clipping.
One possibility is that this older nark comes from the Romani nak, meaning nose. The use of nose to mean an informer dates to the eighteenth century. The 1789 first edition of George Parker’s Life's Painter of Variegated Characters in Public and Private Life defines a nose as a “snitch.” And James Hardy Vaux’s 1819 Vocabulary of the Flash Language has these entries:
NOSE, a thief who becomes an evidence against his accomplices; also, a person who seeing one or more suspicious characters in the streets, makes a point of watching them in order to frustrate any attempt they may make, or to cause their apprehension; also, a spy or informer of any description.
NOSE, to nose, is to pry into any person’s proceedings in an impertinent manner. To nose upon any one, is to tell of any thing he has said or done with a view to injure him, or to benefit yourself.
On its face, it is reasonable to think that Roma criminals in England adopted nak as a calque for the slang sense of nose, and in turn nak made its way back into English criminal slang as nark. But there are two problems with this explanation. The first is that the shift from a short /o/ or /a/ in nak to the /aɹ/ in nark is unusual—not impossible, but odd. The second is that the earliest uses of nark in English are those of a miserly or otherwise unpleasant person. Given that dates of appearance of slang terms in print is at best only a fuzzy indication of when they were actually coined in speech, this does not rule out an origin in Romani, but it does cast doubt on it.
The sense of nark meaning an unpleasant person is in place by the 1840s. From Swell’s Night Guide of 1849, an underground guidebook to bordellos and other disreputable establishments of London:
But since these mendedicity coves has come up—they are so down on us kids that its almost a gooser vith us. They are the rankest narks vot ever God put guts into, or ever farted in a kickses case; vell, so I’ve just come to beat this ere walk a bit.
TOTTY.—O! you’ll find a decent pad or two in this valk. But vot ever you does, don’t doss at that ere Trav’ler’s Rest—they calls it The Trav’ler’s Rest. Vhy, thunder my groggy! if any trav’ler gets rest there—why it is a reglar bug trap and a jumper valk and chat hutch, and stinks of crap and cag like a dunniken, and the donna of the ken is a dead crab, and a nark. I doss’d there von night—and send I may live, if I dropped my ogle slums once, and I couldn’t stall a paddle, coss they dubs the jigger, and scarpers with the screw. O she’s a thundering nark!
(Both the Oxford English Dictionary and Green’s Dictionary of Slang date this passage to 1846. They may have access to an earlier edition than I have. Green’s includes this passage under the definition of police informant, but the context is clearly that of a bad person, a thief.)
This sense of an unpleasant person is still in use in Australia & New Zealand.
Nark could also be used more specifically to mean a miser. From Henry Mayhew’s 1851 London Labour and the London Poor in a list of charitable people whom beggars could ask for money with reasonable chance of success:
Mrs. Taggart, Bayswater (her husband is a Unitarian minister, not so good as she, but he’ll stand a “bob” if you look straight at him and keep to one story.)
Archdeacon Sinclair, at Kensington (but not as good as Archdeacon Pott, as was there afore him; he was a good man; he couldn’t refuse a dog, much more a Christian; but he had a butler, a regular “knark,” who was a b— and a half, good weight.)
Lady Cottenham used to be good, but she is “coopered” (spoilt) now, without you has a “slum,” any one as she knows, and then she won’t stand above a “bull” (five shillings).
The spelling here of knark hints that it may be a borrowing from Danish, where knark also once meant miser, although it could just be a spelling variant; slang terms often have multiple and fanciful spellings in their early years. From Berthelson’s 1754 English-Danish dictionary:
SNUDGE, Sub. gammel knark.
Snudge had been English slang for a miser since the sixteenth century, and gammel is Danish for old. In present-day Danish, however, knark is slang for narcotics, showing that the same conflation of words happened in that that language too.
It’s a small step from underground slang for an unpleasant person to police informant, and the informer sense of nark is in place by the end of the 1850s. Here is an entry from Ducange Anglicus’s 1859 The Vulgar Tongue. He spells it nard, however, and whether that is an error on his or the printer’s part, or whether it reflects an actual pronunciation is uncertain:
NARD, n. A person who obtains information under seal of confidence, and afterwards breaks faith.
But we have the nark spelling the following year. From Hotten’s 1860 slang dictionary, entries that parallel Vaux’s earlier ones for nose:
NARK, a person in the pay of the police; a common informer; one who gets his living by laying traps for publicans, &c.
NARK, to watch, or look after, “NARK the titter;” watch the girl.
This informant sense of nark continues to the present day. It appears in a 1914 draft of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, in a scene where Eliza Doolittle fears being arrested:
THE FLOWER GIRL Oh, sir, dont let him charge me. You dunno what it means to me. Theyll take away my character and drive me on the streets for speaking to gentlemen. They—
THE NOTE TAKER (coming forward on her right, the rest crowding after him) There, there, there, there! whos hurting you, you silly girl? What do you take me for?
THE BYSTANDER. It's all right: hes a gentleman: look at his boots. (Explaining to the note taker) She thought you was a copper's nark, sir.
THE NOTE TAKER (with quick interest) Whats a copper's nark?
THE BYSTANDER (inapt at definition) It's a—well, it's a copper's nark, as you might say. What else would you call it? A sort of informer.
There are later uses this sense of nark to be found, but as one proceeds into the latter half of the twentieth century, it becomes unclear where the older term gives way to the newer, narcotics one. And this older nark never gained a firm foothold in North America, being confined chiefly to Britain, Australia, and New Zealand.
The use of narco to mean drugs, a straightforward clipping of narcotics, appears by the 1950s. In a letter of 12 January 1954 James Blake describes the police interrogating him:
They brought him in, someone I hardly knew, a wild-eyed savage hurling accusations of homosexual orgies spiced with all manner of narco. In the face of such a shocking and unexpected onslaught, I was commendably cool.
That same decade, narco would also come to mean a police narcotics officer. From an article about the beat poets by John Ciardi, published in the Saturday Review on 6 February 1960:
The G.I. generation had its potential rebellion largely blurred by army restrictions and could do little more than grumble or go AWOL on a binge, but that much at least they did manage regularly enough. The Beat Generation has marihuana and the ritual of dodging the “narcos”—the narcotics squad.
By the mid-1960s narco had been clipped even further to narc or nark. (The occasional <k> spelling is not necessarily connected to the older term; as mentioned, slang spelling, particularly in the early years of a term seeing print, is highly variable.) Timothy Leary uses it in his 1965 The Politics of Ecstasy, and here it is unclear if Leary is using the term to refer to law enforcement officers or paid informers:
Big power struggle over control of drugs in Washington. The narcotics bureau of the Treasury Department wanted to keep all drugs illegal, to step up law enforcement, add thousands of T-men, G-men and narks to the payroll. On the other hand, the medics and scientists in the government wanted the FDA to handle all drugs, including heroin, pot, LSD. Make it a medical matter.
And narc makes an appearance in the 1970 novel Shaft by Ernest Tidyman:
He was frightened and he wasn’t sure why. The police didn’t frighten him. The Narcs didn't frighten him. His own customers (who were capable of killing a man for a lot less than he usually carried) didn’t frighten him either. But Ben Buford did.
The shift from police officer to police informer, all in the context of illegal drugs, is definitely in place by the end of the 1970s. From the 1979 Angel Dust: An Ethnographic Study of PCP Users:
They start taking me to the police car and instantly, just like that, I just kind of came down. I came to and I was coherent. Wow, what's going on? Wow, you're going to arrest me. Gee, thanks for stopping me. God, I was thanking the guy, shaking his hand and all this stuff. He said I can see you're kind of back to normal now. He asked were drugs involved here tonight? Oh yeah, yeah, drugs were involved. In fact, we were smoking PCP. Here let me go and get it for you. Ran back into the house, had a gram of dust, gave it to him, handed it to him. And he was asking me, are you a dealer or do you sell? I said no, no, no. Hey now, we just buy it for our own personal use. So he says, OK this one is on me. He took the dust and left. Well he asked me if I wanted to be a narc or an informer or all that bullshit.
Whether this informer sense of narc was influenced by the older, British sense of nark meaning an informant is unknown. On the one hand, the clipping of narcotics to narco to narc is both documented and a completely ordinary pattern of morphological development. On the other hand, nark meaning an informer was already present in criminal slang. And it may be that North American use of narc and narco is utterly unrelated to the older term, where use in Britain is influenced by it. But to what degree the older term influenced the newer one is unknown and likely never to be determined.
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