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tosh

Pronunciation: /tɒʃ/

The English word “tosh” has 17 meanings listed here.

noun

  1. Copper; items made of copper.
  2. Valuables retrieved from drains and sewers.
  3. Rubbish, trash, (now especially) nonsense, bosh, balderdash
  4. A bath or foot pan
  5. Easy bowling
  6. Used as a form of address.
  7. A half-crown coin; its value
  8. A crown coin; its value
  9. Any money, particularly pre-decimalization British coinage

verb

  1. To steal copper, particularly from ship hulls
  2. To search for valuables in sewers
  3. To use a tosh-pan, either to wash, to splash, or to "bath"
  4. To make ‘tosh’: to tidy, to trim.

adjective

  1. Tight.
  2. Neat, clean; tidy, trim.
  3. Comfortable, agreeable; friendly, intimate.

adverb

  1. Toshly: neatly, tidily

Etymology

From 19th-century British thieves' cant, of uncertain origin. Perhaps from *tarsh, a metathetic alteration of trash; or from toss. Sense of nonsense possibly influenced by tush (“nonsense! tsk tsk!”) attested from 15th century.

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Definitions are from Wiktionary, extracted by Kaikki.org, and are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.