Word of the Day Archive
Monday February 11, 2013
kinchin \kin-chin\
, noun:
a child.
He's naught but a kinchin, no bigger than a sparrow.
-- Joan Aiken, The Whispering Mountain
Now I come to think of it, Kinchin is English too. In Oliver Twist the boys who work for Fagin are taught to be kinchins and prig people's wipes.
-- Angela Thirkell, Caroline Alice Lejeune, Three Score and Ten
Derived from the German kindchen, kinchin is a diminutive form of kind meaning "child." Kindchen entered the lexicon in the last decade of the 1600s.
Dictionary.com Entry and Pronunciation for kinchin
