hunky

hunky

See also: Hunky

English

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /ˈhʌŋ.ki/

• Audio (AU)

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Etymology 1

From hunk +‎ -y.

Adjective

hunky (comparative hunkier, superlative hunkiest)

1. (informal) Exhibiting strong, masculine beauty.
2. Shaped like a hunk, or piece; chunky.
3. (US, slang) All right; in good condition.
4. (US, slang) even; square; on equal footing with
   • 1900, Stephen Crane, Wounds in the Rain:

     […] he dropped like a brick into the firing line and began to shoot; began to get "hunky" with all those people who had been plugging at him.

Derived terms

• hunky-dory
• hunky punk

 

Related terms

• hunk

Etymology 2

From the older *hunk, probably alteration of Hungarian +‎ -ie/-y. Compare bohunk and honky / honkey.

Alternative forms

• hunkie, hunkey

Noun

hunky (plural hunkies)

1. (US, slang, now uncommon, ethnic slur) A Hungarian or other eastern European, e.g. a Romanian or a Slav. (Sometimes applied (like honky) to any white person.)
   • 1924, Jack Bethea, Bed Rock, page 175:

     "All hunkies and wops, and no wonder there was seven hundred and fifty of them."

   • 1940, Unemployment Compensation Interpretation Service: Benefit series, page 183:

     He made hunkies and cut ice-cream sandwiches.

   • 1952, Chester Himes, Cast the First Stone, page 66:

     The night before I had let a hunky called Big John have a dollar's worth of chips in the poker game […]

   • 1969, Robert Beck (Iceberg Slim), Trick Baby, page 149:

     He said, "I'm going to buy this building and turn this into a Nigger bar. I'm going to bar all you fucking hunkies."

   • 1994, Josephine Wtulich, American Xenophobia and the Slav Immigrant: A Living Legacy of Mind and Spirit:

     On the negative side, a hunky was culturally schizophrenic, an inhabitant of crowded and ill-kept rooms and whose clothing was in poor taste, an alcoholic, intrinsically dull and stupid, an offspring of domineering parents, […]

   • 2009, Victor Bockris, Warhol: The Biography‎, page 20:

     Like blacks, who were the only ethnic group below them on the social scale, Eastern Europeans, contemptuously labelled ‘hunkies’, were dismissed as incapable and untrustworthy.

References

• “hunky” in the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, Second Edition, Oxford University Press, 2004.