Short answers, pulled from the story.
Jabberwocky is a nonsense poem by Lewis Carroll about the killing of a creature called the Jabberwock. It was published in his 1871 novel Through the Looking-Glass, the sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and is narrated through a series of invented words set within recognisable English syntax and an ABAB rhyme scheme.
The first stanza of Jabberwocky was printed in 1855 in Mischmasch, a family periodical Carroll wrote and illustrated himself. The complete poem was published in 1871 in Through the Looking-Glass.
Two words Carroll invented for Jabberwocky entered standard English usage and are listed in the Oxford English Dictionary: "chortle", a blend of "chuckle" and "snort", and "galumphing", possibly a blend of "gallop" and "triumphant". The word "jabberwocky" itself has come to mean nonsense language.
Jabberwocky has been translated into 65 languages. Translators typically solve the problem of the invented words by creating equivalent nonsense words that echo Carroll's sounds while respecting the grammar and morphology of the target language.
John Tenniel illustrated the Jabberwock in the 1871 edition of Through the Looking-Glass, though he agreed to do so reluctantly. His depiction gave the creature the leathery wings of a pterodactyl and the long scaly neck and tail of a sauropod, reflecting the Victorian fascination with palaeontology.
According to G. K. Chesterton and biographer Roger Lancelyn Green, Carroll wrote Jabberwocky to satirise pretentious verse and ignorant literary critics, as a demonstration of how not to write poetry. The poem has also been interpreted as a parody of contemporary Oxford scholarship, specifically concerning Benjamin Jowett, the Professor of Greek at Oxford and Master of Balliol.