▪ I. kike slang (orig. U.S.).
(kaɪk)
[Said to be an alteration of -ki (or -ky), a common ending of the personal names of Eastern European Jews who emigrated to the U.S. at the turn of the 20th c.]
A vulgarly offensive name for a Jew. Also attrib. or as adj.
| 1904 R. L. McCardell Show Girl & her Friends 49 And what do you think? He had the impudence to tell me that Louie Zinsheimer was a kike! 1912 McClure's Mag. XXXIX. 230/2 ‘It's a mascot, be-dad! Jam it, ye kike!’ screeched Tracy. 1919 F. Hurst Humoresque 211 A little red-haired kike like her! 1919 Mencken Amer. Lang. 115 An Englishman..knows nothing of our common terms of disparagement, such as kike..and rube. 1924 P. Marks Plastic Age xviii. 201 You go chasing around with kikes and micks. 1932 J. Dos Passos 1919 164 The little kike behind the desk had never been to sea. 1940 R. Stout Over my Dead Body vi. 84, I don't care if the background is wop or mick or kike..so long as it's American. 1956 D. Karp All Honorable Men 74 If you repeat that lie, I'll wring that skinny kike neck of yours with my own hands! 1963 V. Nabokov Gift iii. 179 My better half..was for twenty years the wife of a kike and got mixed up with a whole rabble of Jew in-laws. 1963 Spectator 21 June 815 He knocks down Stern's wife, calls her a kike. 1972 National Observer (U.S.) 27 May 17/3 When kikes are shrewd and dagos or wops are sly and murderous, it is only one step from the epithet to contempt. |
▪ II. kike
obs. form of keek v., kick v.