Word.ws English Dictionary

chamcha

chamcha noun: a sycophant and hanger-on or lackey.

Noun

chamcha (plural chamchas)

  1. (India, South-Asia, colloquial, informal, Indian politics) A sycophant and hanger-on or lackey.
    • 1989. Stuart Auerbach. Washington Post. (Mar. 26) “Nehru and His Nation”
      M J Akbar has been called a chamcha to the Gandhi family, and some of that slavish devotion shows up in his uncritical acceptance of Nehru’s government-dominated economic program and the erosion of the country’s grass roots...
    • Chamcha Sycophant (lit. ‘spoon’). 1997. Ghulam Nabi Azad. India Today (June 23) p. 13: I have my own standing in the party. I cannot be anybody’s chamcha (stooge).1994. William Dalrymple City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi (Dec. 1) “Glossary” p. 340

Forms of chamcha

pluralchamchas

Origin of chamcha

Borrowed from Hindustani (Hindi चमचा (camcā) / Urdu چَمْچَہ (camca, “yesman, sycophant, hanger-on, lackey, pet, puppet, stooge”, literally “spoon”)), from Classical Persian چَمْچَه (čamča), from Turkic, ultimately from Proto-Turkic *kamïč,.

Words formed from chamcha

Questions about chamcha

What does chamcha mean?
Chamcha means a sycophant and hanger-on or lackey.
What part of speech is chamcha?
Chamcha is a noun.
What is the plural of chamcha?
The plural of chamcha is chamchas.

Words near chamcha in the dictionary

  1. chambres
  2. chambress
  3. chambresses
  4. chambré
  5. Chambéry
  6. chamcha
  7. chamchagiri
  8. chamchas
  9. Chamdo
  10. chameck
  11. chamecks

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: chamcha (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “chamcha.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/chamcha. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.