Care if you are sick
A letter V, reported to mean that the people of the house would care for a hobo who was sick.
Meaning
Dan Beard wrote in 1918 that a sign shaped like the letter V “tells that the people will take care of you if you are sick”. The National Cryptologic Museum’s sample sheet has a sign for “If you’re sick, care is given here”, and another for “Doctor here”.
Origin and history
The meaning is the same in both sources but the drawing is not: the museum’s sheet draws a short upright with a hook to the right at the top, closer to a small letter r than to Beard’s V. Our drawing follows Beard, the earlier source.
Variant forms
Variation of this kind runs through the hobo signs. The museum itself notes that some signs are the same from one source to another, while “several look the same, but have a different meaning”.
Read next
See also
Kind woman lives here, Food given here, Religious talk for a meal, Dog here, Keep quiet, Judge lives here.
Sources
- The American Boys’ Book of Signs, Signals and Symbols, Dan Beard, J. B. Lippincott, Philadelphia, 1918 (Cornell scan on the Internet Archive), Internet Archive, ch. VII, fig. 69
- Sample of Some Hobo Signs, National Cryptologic Museum, exhibit sheet (hobo-signs-definitions.pdf), National Security Agency, page 1
- Hobo Communications: A Brief History of Hobos and Their Signs, National Cryptologic Museum exhibit, 4 August 2021, National Security Agency
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from letters and numbers or lines.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research
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