Word of the Day:
tchotchke
What It Means
A small ornament of minor value; a knick-knack, a trinket.
An attractive girl or woman.
Tchotchke in Context
“He looked Elinor over appraisingly as she seated herself on the banquette between him and Jake. "A real tsatskeh," he said with approval.”
Did You Know?
Borrowed from Yiddish טשאַטשקע (tshatshke, “ornament; trinket; toy; (figurative) attractive girl or woman”), from a Slavic language and probably ultimately imitative of a baby’s utterances. Slavic cognates * Polish cacko (“toy; knick-knack, trinket; pretty thing”), from caca (“nice thing”), and czaczko (“(obsolete) toy; trinket; pretty thing”) * Russian ца́цка (cácka, “(informal) knick-knack, trinket; (dated) toy”), from ца́ца (cáca, “toy; trinket; well-behaved child; nice person; conceited person”) * Ukrainian ца́цка (cácka, “(dated) toy; ornament, trinket; conceited person; well-dressed person”), from ца́ца (cáca, “toy; well-behaved child; conceited person; attractive woman”)
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: tchotchke (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the word and reformatted its meaning, examples and origin.
Cite this entry: “tchotchke.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/tchotchke. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
