pachuco

pachuco

English

Etymology

From Mexican Spanish pachuco (“flashily dressed”).

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /pəˈt͡ʃuːkəʊ/

Noun

pachuco (countable and uncountable, plural pachucos)

1. (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 43419454, 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.

2. (uncountable) An argot spoken by that group, sometimes known as caló.
   • 1974, Linda Fine Katz, The Evolution of the Pachuco Language and Culture, University of California, Los Angeles, 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

• chuke

Further reading

• pachuco on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
• “pachuco”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.

Anagrams

• capouch, coach up

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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

• IPA^(key): /paˈt͡ʃuko/ [paˈt͡ʃu.ko]
• Rhymes: -uko
• Syllabification: pa‧chu‧co

Adjective

pachuco (feminine pachuca, masculine plural pachucos, feminine plural pachucas)

1. (Mexico) flashy, flashily dressed
2. (Costa Rica) slang (often considered low-class)

Noun

pachuco m (plural pachucos, feminine pachuca, feminine plural pachucas)

1. (Costa Rica) uneducated person from the city who uses city slang

Further reading

• “pachuco”, in Diccionario de la lengua española, Vigésima tercera edición, Real Academia Española, 2014