Drawing mostly on material in the periodical 'La Lleca' (The Street), published in Bogota, Colombia, a semantic typology of the slang vocabulary used by the city's indigents, drug addicts, and criminals is presented. The items are listed -with meaning definitions and references to documented attestations- in the following categories: (1) international terms from the thieves' slang, (2) designations formed by syllable reversal, (3) global metaphors, (4) partial metaphors, (5) drug use/traffic terminology, (6) similes, (7) calques from English, (8) endocentric formations, and (9) the difficulty in interpreting and classifying these terms. (Z. Dubiel in LLBA 2003, vol. 37, n. 5)