tchotchke
Other forms: tchotchkes
A tchotchke is a small, decorative object that's not valuable or precious. When you travel to a foreign country, you might buy some tchotchkes to give as gifts to your friends back home.
A tchotchke is some kind of trinket or bauble, like inexpensive jewelry or the prize you get in a cereal box. Less often, tchotchke is used to mean "pretty girl or woman." The word comes, via Yiddish, from a Slavic root, and over the years it's been spelled in numerous different ways. When you pronounce tchotchke, the first t is silent.
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(Yiddish) an inexpensive showy trinkettype of:collectable, collectiblethings considered to be worth collecting (not necessarily valuable or antique)
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(Yiddish) an attractive, unconventional womansynonyms: chachka, tchotchkeleh, tsatske, tshatshke
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Vocabulary lists containing tchotchke
Words from Round 2 of the 2014 Scripps National Spelling Bee.
English has borrowed many words from Yiddish, which is itself an amalgam of German, Russian, Hebrew and many other languages. Here are 15 more English words that derive from Yiddish — some of which are very common, and some of which might be less familiar to you. Looking for more Yiddish-derived words? Check out our original list of English Words Derived from Yiddish.
Also a Firekeeper's Daughter, sixteen-year-old Pearl (Perry) Mary Firekeeper-Birch would rather be fishing on Sugar Island, but as a summer intern, she becomes involved in a database of missing and murdered Indigenous women throughout Michigan.