A pet name for a close friend — Victorian slang recorded in 1909, whose own recorder said it meant nothing at all.
What it really means
There is one word on this list that is not rude about anyone, and its best feature is that it means nothing.
A chuckaboo is a close friend. J. Redding Ware recorded it in 1909 as a name given familiarly to a favourite chum — and then, unusually for a lexicographer, added his honest opinion of it: No meaning.
He was not being dismissive. He was being accurate. Some words describe a thing. Others are just a noise you make at someone you are fond of, and chuckaboo is the second kind. It has the same job as ducky or petal: it tells the other person how you feel about them and carries no information at all.
Ware did offer a guess at where the front half came from — chuck, he thought, was probably a turned-round duck, the old British endearment. The -aboo is a flourish. Put together, it sounds exactly like what it is: something said with a grin.
It is the easiest word on the list to bring back, because it asks nothing of anyone except that they be your friend.
Where it comes from
Ware's own verdict on its meaning was 'No meaning' — the word is pure affection, not description.
Myths & misconceptions
Chuckaboo literally means 'close friend'.
It is used for a close friend, but the man who recorded it said it had 'no meaning'. It was a sound people made at someone they liked — the way 'ducky' is — rather than a word describing friendship.
How it connects
- Gigglemugthe other friendly word on the list, from the same 1909 book.
Questions people ask
- Is chuckaboo a real Victorian word?
- Yes. It is in Ware's Passing English of the Victorian Era (1909), labelled 'Peoples'' — his tag for ordinary popular speech.
- Where does chuckaboo come from?
- Ware thought the 'chuck' was probably a form of 'duck', the old endearment. The rest he regarded as meaningless.