A-Z Database
An abbreviation of chitty and is Anglo-Indian from the late 18th century, while chitty itself dates from about one hundred years earlier; means a lett...
Chit, chat, chitter, chatter are all words imitative of the sounds that birds make and all these words date from The Middle Ages. All of them soon bec...
see Chit
To chivvy is to harass persistently and dates from the late 18th century. It is merely a variation of chevy, a word meaning a hunt or chase, which der...
British derogatory term for someone who is black/coloured on the outside and white on the inside, implying non-adherence to original racial background...
Chock-a-block means crammed full or crammed tightly together and is originally a nautical expression dating from the early 19th century. It is sometim...
see Chock-a-block
Annoyed, angry, deterred or discouraged in some way this figurative usage dates from the late 1920s and derives from the act of choking or pulling bac...
Back in the 1400s, to chop meant to barter deriving from the Old English ceapian from which we get the word cheap. Thus, the archaic meaning of chop a...
Contrary to popular myth, chop suey is not a Chinese-style dish invented in America although it was introduced into America by Chinese immigrant worke...
To do something chop-chop is to do it smartly, briskly, with alacrity. Its origin is early 19th century from Cantonese Pidgin English chop, meaning qu...
Trivial, insignificant, derives from American Jewish informal from the mid-20th century as in, “do I look like chopped liver to you?” Chopped chicken...
British slang for penis, a metaphor for an aggressive weapon, which the penis can sometimes be one supposes, dates from the 1940s. Chopper is also inf...
A portmanteau word coined by Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking Glass (1872), a combination of chuckle and snort.
Chow is both a verb and a noun and is slang for to eat or food of any kind. It dates from the mid-19th century, and was probably first used by sailors...