toches

The English spelling toches is a transliteration of a Yiddish word. (Yiddish is a language based largely on Middle High German dialects and uses the Hebrew alphabet.) The English word therefore tries to represent a non-English pronunciation, which itself can vary from one Yiddish or English speaker to another, and may range from the somewhat guttural [taw, -, kh, uh, s] to the use of a harder middle -k- sound (called a velar stop) as in [taw, -k, uh, s]. Because of the range of Yiddish and English pronunciations, a number of variant English spellings exist, the most common or acceptable of which are shown in this entry: tuchis, tochus, tokus, tokes, tookus, and tochis. However, creative attempts to capture the range of pronunciations have yielded numerous other forms of the word as well, which can crop up especially in informal writing: for example, tuches, tochas, tochess, tuchas, tocus, toochis, toochus, tookis, tokhes, tokhus and more. So there are more than enough ways to write and say this Yiddish word for a very basic part of human anatomy.