Judge lives here
A spiral, reported to mean that a judge or magistrate lived at the house; a spiral in a circle was the court house.
Meaning
Dan Beard (1918) gave a sign for a judge or magistrate, which tramps used for any officer of the law, and wrote that a rough spiral inside a circle, “literally an enclosed magistrate”, stood for a court house. The National Cryptologic Museum’s sample sheet draws a spiral for “Judge lives here” and the spiral inside a circle for “Courthouse”, the same pairing.
Origin and history
Beard notes that the circle drawn around another sign turned it into a building: a circle around a policeman read as a police station. The spiral and the circled spiral are one of the clearest cases where his signs and the museum’s match.
Read next
- Next in Hobo symbolsLeave quicklyA circle crossed by two arrows, reported to mean that a hobo should leave town quickly, usually because the police were looking.
- The same shape in Egyptian gods and their symbolsHathorThe Egyptian goddess of the sky, of women, love, music and drink, first worshipped as a cow. Her symbols are the cow’s horns with the sun disc between them, the sistrum rattle and the menat necklace, and her face with cow’s ears crowns the columns of her temples.
See also
Kind woman lives here, Food given here, Religious talk for a meal, Care if you are sick, Gentleman lives here, Dog 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. IX, figs. 95 and 124
- Sample of Some Hobo Signs, National Cryptologic Museum, exhibit sheet (hobo-signs-definitions.pdf), National Security Agency, page 1
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from curves and waves.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research
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