tchotchke
/ˈt͡ʃɑt͡ʃkə/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 1.18 in modern English
23
Scrabble Score
9
Letters
2
Syllables
6
Unique Chars
Meaning
Example Sentences
- "We're stuck with: 14 Provincial & Modern Kitchen chairs— […] 23 assorted Lamps and miscellaneous "Tchotchkes"! Help us unload."
- "Barbra Streisand's ambition: to open a knick-knack shop called "Tchotchkes" (Yiddish for "knick-knacks") …"
- "The idea of a discount operation, of course, is that it shouldn't look like a boutique. Presumably the price tags are decoration enough. "Décor doesn't add to the glamour of a suit," an owner pointed out. "You're not buying the rugs or the lamps or the tsatskes.""
- "I am a child of modernism – […] As such I have inherited a distrust of the tchotchke, which I have still – even as the house I was raised in of course had its share of (modernist) tchotchkes: the Asian art, the Danish designware, the Indian pottery, the MoMA catalogues."
- "With limited cash and a thirst for uncommon sights, backpackers have pushed into challenging territory well before the big-money resorts or tchotchke merchants."
- "The awsome dissonance of Psycho works independently even as it instantly evokes Norman Bates's stabbing knife and Marion Crane's helpless scream. Once again [Alfred] Hitchcock overturned the convention that music must remain subliminally in the background of a film: […] in its quiet moments, it roams grimly wherever it pleases, investing the most banal images—a toy, a car on an empty highway, a suitcase on a bed, a tchotchke of folding hands—with dread."
Etymology
Borrowed from Yiddish טשאַטשקע (tshatshke, “ornament; trinket; toy; (figurative) attractive girl or woman”), from a Slavic language and probably ultimately imitative of a baby’s utterances. Slavic cognates * Polish cacko (“toy; knick-knack, trinket; pretty thing”), from caca (“nice thing”), and czaczko (“(obsolete) toy; trinket; pretty thing”) * Russian ца́цка (cácka, “(informal) knick-knack, trinket; (dated) toy”), from ца́ца (cáca, “toy; trinket; well-behaved child; nice person; conceited person”) * Ukrainian ца́цка (cácka, “(dated) toy; ornament, trinket; conceited person; well-dressed person”), from ца́ца (cáca, “toy; well-behaved child; conceited person; attractive woman”)
Origin
Word Breakdown
- Root: טשאַטשקע, -
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ˈt͡ʃɑt͡ʃkə/
- British English: /ˈt͡ʃɒt͡ʃkə/