Religious talk for a meal
A plain cross, reported to mean that a hobo who listened to, or gave, a religious talk would be fed.
Meaning
Dan Beard (1918) gave the cross as “a hint to be good”, which among tramps meant “give them a religious talk and they will give you food”. The National Cryptologic Museum’s sample sheet has the same cross for “Religious talk will get you a free meal”. The mark is the plainest of the signs, a single upright and crossbar, and it is easy to confuse with the circle with a cross inside.
Origin and history
Beard took the tramp signs he had collected and offered them to Boy Scouts and sportsmen as a ready-made set of trail marks, so some of what he printed was already being turned to other uses in 1918.
In other readings
Lists of signs do not agree with one another. The Historic Graffiti Society found the simplest mark, a circle, given five different meanings in sources from 1890 to 1931, the first of them, in the Seward Independent of 1890, “religious”. The hub page has the rest of the debate.
Read next
- Next in Hobo symbolsCare if you are sickA letter V, reported to mean that the people of the house would care for a hobo who was sick.
- The same shape in Halloween symbolsSoul cakeA small cake given on All Souls’ Day to poor people who went door to door “a souling”, begging for it in return for prayers for the dead. It is often named as a forerunner of trick-or-treating.
See also
Food given here, Kind woman lives here, Gentleman lives here, 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. IV, fig. 36
- Sample of Some Hobo Signs, National Cryptologic Museum, exhibit sheet (hobo-signs-definitions.pdf), National Security Agency, page 1
- Hobo Signs: Code of the Road?, 2 February 2020, updated 12 February 2022, The Historic Graffiti Society, Disagreement Among Signs
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from crosses.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research
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