Green’s Dictionary of Slang

1. a mixture of wine and water, topped off by a roasted orange, supposedly an episcopal favourite.

a.1735		Swift ‘Women Who Cry Oranges’ in A. Carpenter Verse in Eng. in 18C Ireland (1998) 185: Come, buy my fine Oranges / [...] / Well roasted, with sugar and wine in a cup. They’ll make a sweet bishop.
1753		World 37 223: Punch, bishop, cool tankard, and negus are equally denied me .
1785, 1788, 1796		Grose Classical Dict. of the Vulgar Tongue.
1811		Lex. Balatronicum.
1821		Egan Life in London (1869) 99: Logic had a complete map of the Isles of Bishop and Flip.
1829		Vidocq Memoirs (trans. W. McGinn) II 59: Boutrois, bring more ‘bishops’ as if it rained wine.
1836–7		Dickens Pickwick Papers (1999) 642: A gentleman with one eye, and the landlord, who were drinking a bowl of bishop together.
1845		‘A Week in Oxford’ in Bell’s Life in Sydney 25 Oct. 2/2: The nearest approach to things ecclesiastical was a bowl of ‘bishop’ .
1853		‘Cuthbert Bede’ Adventures of Mr Verdant Green (1982) I 131: He taught me [...] to make shandy-gaff and sherry-cobbler, and brew bishop and egg-flip.
1912		Sun (NY) 17 Feb. n.p.: You may never want a bumper of bishop.
1857		Trollope Three Clerks (1869) 98: Come, you don’t like the brandy toddy, nor I either. We’ll see what sort of a hand they are at making a bowl of bishop.
1890		Bulletin (Sydney) 12 July 13/3: ‘My good man, you should not swear like that. Here is a tract. Go home and read it.’ ‘Take this bad “bishop”, old chap,’ answered the sinner handing him some mulled spiced claret, ‘and tell me if you wouldn’t swear.’.

2. the size/rotundity of the stereotypically well-fed clergyman.

3. a broken signpost [mild anti-clericalism: it neither points the way nor travels it].

1937–84

Partridge DSUE (1984) 82/2: ? mid-C.19–20.

4. a private detective [he ‘searches out sin’].

1972		P. McCabe Apple to the Core in DSUE (1984).
1984		Partridge DSUE (8th edn) 82/2: since 1955.