pachuco

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English

Etymology

From Mexican Spanish pachuco (“flashily dressed”).

Pronunciation

  • IPA(key): /pəˈt͡ʃuːkəʊ/

Noun

pachuco (countable and uncountable, plural pachucos)

  1. (US, countable) A Mexican American, especially a juvenile delinquent in the Los Angeles area.
    • 1957, Jack Kerouac, chapter 13, in On the Road, Viking Press, →OCLC, part 1:
      Now they saw that Terry was Mexican, a Pachuco wildcat; and that her boy was worse than that.
    • 1998, Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain:
      They asked him if he was a pachuco. He said all the pachucos he knew of lived in El Paso. He told em he didn’t know any Mexican pachucos.
  2. (uncountable) An argot spoken by that group, sometimes known as caló.
    • 1974, Linda Fine Katz, The Evolution of the Pachuco Language and Culture, Los Angeles: University of California, page 41:
      Like the zoot suit, the Pachuco caló was adopted by a large part of the Chicano youth who did not, in essence, identify themselves as Pachucos.

Derived terms

Further reading

Anagrams

Spanish

Etymology

Unknown etymology. Hypotheses include:

Pronunciation

  • IPA(key): /paˈt͡ʃuko/
  • Rhymes: -uko
  • Syllabification: pa‧chu‧co

Adjective

pachuco (feminine pachuca, masculine plural pachucos, feminine plural pachucas)

  1. (Mexico) flashy, flashily dressed
  2. (Costa Rica) slang (often considered low-class)

Noun

pachuco m (plural pachucos, feminine pachuca, feminine plural pachucas)

  1. (Mexico) dandy
    • 2023 July 22, Rafael Estefanía, “Los pachucos, los últimos dandis de México”, in El País‎:
      Las cicatrices son testimonio de otras épocas más violentas y menos románticas, cuando los pachucos se movían en las aguas turbias de los pandilleros antes de convertirse en dandis.
      (please add an English translation of this quotation)
  2. (Costa Rica) uneducated person from the city who uses city slang

Further reading

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