tosheroon
tosheroon noun: a half-crown coin; its value.
Noun
tosheroon (plural tosheroons)
- A half-crown coin; its value
- “’Ere y'are, the best rig-out you ever ’ad. A tosheroon [half a crown]^([sic]) for the coat, two ’ogs for the trousers, one and a tanner for the boots, and a ’og for the cap and scarf. That's seven bob.”1933 January 9, George Orwell [pseudonym; Eric Arthur Blair], chapter XXIX, in Down and Out in Paris and London, London: Victor Gollancz […], →OCLC, pages 214–215
- tush or tosh. Money: Cockney: late C.19–20. Ex: tusheroon... But H. errs, I believe: he should mean half-a-crown, for tusheroon and its C.20 variant tossaroon (2s. 6d.) are manifest corruptions of Lingua Franca MADZA CAROON.1961, Eric Partridge, The Routledge Dictionary of Historical Slang
- A crown coin; its value
- Half-a-crown is known as an alderman, half a bull, half a tusheroon, and a madza caroon; whilst a crown piece, or five shillings, may be called either a bull, or a caroon, or a cartwheel, or a coachwheel, or a thick-un, or a tusheroon.1859, J.C. Hotten, A Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant, and Vulgar Words
- ‘Tush’, for money, would be an abbreviation of ‘tusheroon’, which in old cant, and also in tinker dialect, signified a crown.1912, J.W. Horsley, I Remember, xii. 253
Forms of tosheroon
| plural | tosheroons |
|---|---|
| alternative form | tusheroon |
| alternative form | tossaroon |
Origin of tosheroon
From 19th-century British slang, developed from or alongside tusheroon, of uncertain derivation from British slang caroon (“crown, a 5-shilling silver coin”), from Sabir and (originally) Italian corona (“crown”). The term was either derived from or influenced by madza caroon, the British slang for the Sabir and Italian mezzo corona (“half-crown”), possibly under influence from tosh (“copper items; valuables”) above or from the half-crown's value of two shillings & sixpence.
Words formed from tosheroon
Questions about tosheroon
- What does tosheroon mean?
- Tosheroon means a half-crown coin; its value.
- What part of speech is tosheroon?
- Tosheroon is a noun.
- What is the plural of tosheroon?
- The plural of tosheroon is tosheroons.
Words near tosheroon in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: tosheroon (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: “tosheroon.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/tosheroon. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.