sanguinary, adj. — Green’s Dictionary of Slang

sanguinary adj.

also sanguineous

1835		Bolton Chron. 14 Nov. 4/5: ‘This woman rushes up [...] and bellers out “Where’s that — (sanguinary) Misses Jefferson” [...] and then she calls out “You — (sanguinary female dog), I’ll cut your — (sanguinary viscera) out with this here —(sanguinary) knife” ’.
1846		Bell’s Life in Sydney 26 Sept. 4/1: The frantic blowen screeched out [...] ‘cut the sanguinary mare’s throat’.
1852		Bell’s Life in Sydney 25 Sept. 3/1: Mr Oxley thereupon gave vent to [...] Billinsgate vernacular for half-an-hour, threatening to chop Mr Pearson's sanguinary liver to fiddle strings.
1859		Matsell Vocabulum.
1860		R. Nicholson Rogue’s Progress (1966) 111: Two or three vulgar and thinking men added that most objectionable crimson adjective and addressed him as sanguinary old colonel.
1882		A. Trumble Mysteries of N.Y. 75: But anathemise his sanguinary optics if he knew much.
1882		Bristol Magpie 22 June 19/1: A pretty drag a chap to bring, / To see a sanguinary spring.
1885		Bulletin (Sydney) 17 Jan. 13/1: Next morning the Celtic boss politely requested to be informed ‘what the sanguinary Hades this kind o’ thing might mean?’.
1890		Bulletin (Sydney) 5 July 13/2: A Sydney judge [...] the other day ground out a homily to a young lady in the dock on the error of her ways, and finished off by sentencing her to 18 months with hard labour. ‘Why,’ returned the fair one, ‘I can do that on my head like a sanguinary toff!’.
1900		Sporting Times 26 May 1/5: Gorblimy, Sergeant, aint I taking sanguineous cover? Do you want me to get inside an adjective house?
1905		Argyle Liberal (NSW) 7 Nov. 2/4: ‘Did you say that I was a sanguinary crawler,’ asked Ready, when he got near.
1905		A. Binstead Mop Fair 177: This is a let-off for you and no sanguinary error.
1908		Sun. Times (Perth) 31 May 4/7: Not a snifter, not a soother, not a sanguinary sup.
1917		B.E.F. Times 20 Jan. (2006) 159/2: I implore you, not to send / Another sanguinary home-made cake.
1919		E. Dyson ‘Jam’ in ‘Hello, Soldier!’ 46: Stodgy, splodgy, seepy, soaky, sanguinary jam!
1933		J. Gibbons Truth About the Legion 64: ‘We don’t want’, he said, ‘all the Condemned Books on the Sanguinary Legion to be written by the Unmentionables who have Run Away from It’.

2. in n. use, blood.

1848

Bell’s Life in Sydney 18 Nov. 2/3: The Snob [...] planted a slashing one, two, on the smeller and tater-trap — from which the ‘sanguinary’ oozed freely .

In compounds

sanguinary doubles (n.) [? the site of much bloodshed]

the Piccadilly Saloon, at 222 Piccadilly, London.

1864, 1867, 1870

Hotten Sl. Dict. 200: Pic the Piccadilly Saloon; The earlier abbreviation was dilly. Very fast men were wont (it is now ‘used up’) to call it ‘the sanguinary doubles,’ from the fact of its being situated at No. 222 in Piccadilly.

sanguinary james (n.) [play on bloody jemmy under bloody adj.]

an uncooked sheep’s head.

1841		Bell’s Life in London 22 Apr. 4/5: He contrived to hit Donovan heavily [...] damaging his nut so materially as to give it all the appearance, as Sir Robert Peel would say, of ‘a sanguinary James’, or, as the defunct Scorggins would have vulgarly expressed it, ‘a bloody jemmy’.
1860		Hotten Dict. of Modern Sl. etc. (2nd edn).
1864, 1867, 1870		Hotten Sl. Dict.
1873		Sl. Dict.
1897		Globe 15 Feb. 1/5: A baked sheep’s head is a ‘Jemmy’ [...] sometimes refined into ‘Sanguinary James’.