pachuco
Hello, you have come here looking for the meaning of the word pachuco. In DICTIOUS you will not only get to know all the dictionary meanings for the word pachuco, but we will also tell you about its etymology, its characteristics and you will know how to say pachuco in singular and plural. Everything you need to know about the word pachuco you have here. The definition of the word pachuco will help you to be more precise and correct when speaking or writing your texts. Knowing the definition ofpachuco, as well as those of other words, enriches your vocabulary and provides you with more and better linguistic resources.
English
Etymology
From Mexican Spanish pachuco (“flashily dressed”).
Pronunciation
Noun
pachuco (countable and uncountable, plural pachucos)
- (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.
- (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
pachuco on Wikipedia.Wikipedia - “pachuco”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.
Anagrams
Spanish
Etymology
Unknown etymology. Hypotheses include:
- From a Classical Nahuatl word.
- A shortening of pa El Chuco ("to El Paso").
- From Pachuca.
- From pocho.
Pronunciation
Adjective
pachuco (feminine pachuca, masculine plural pachucos, feminine plural pachucas)
- (Mexico) flashy, flashily dressed
- (Costa Rica) slang (often considered low-class)
Noun
pachuco m (plural pachucos, feminine pachuca, feminine plural pachucas)
- (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)
- (Costa Rica) uneducated person from the city who uses city slang
Further reading
- “pachuco”, in Diccionario de la lengua española [Dictionary of the Spanish Language] (in Spanish), online version 23.8, Royal Spanish Academy [Spanish: Real Academia Española], 2024 December 10