diddy

English

Pronunciation

• Audio (General Australian):

  (file)

• Homophones: ditty (US)
• Rhymes: -ɪdi

Etymology 1

Variant of titty. Attested from the late eighteenth century.

Noun

diddy (plural diddies)

1. (slang) A woman's breast.
   • 1911, Joseph Campbell, Mearing Stones‎^[1]:

     It’s what they call a roany bush. Well, it’s green now, but in a month’s time it’ll be as red as a fox’s diddy, and you wouldn’t know it for berries growing all over it.

   • 2015, Martha Long, Run, Lily, Run, →ISBN, page 155:

     They always have a big belly or a new babby hidden inside the shawl suckin on her diddy.

   • For more quotations using this term, see Citations:diddy.
2. (informal, Ireland, British) A fool, a tit.
   • 2004 September 9, Iain McFadzen, “Remake of Taxi pissing me off”, in CGTalk‎^[2], archived from the original on 14 September 2015:

     Hell, I almost regret editing out my original miss-spelling of the word 'literacy', since your sense of humour seems to be in need of some assistance, and that would have been a classic, one-off opportunity not only to make me look a right diddy, but to finally prove that Americans do understand irony.

Adjective

diddy (comparative diddier, superlative diddiest)

1. (UK, informal) Very small, tiny.
   • 1894, R. Brimley Johnson, editor, Popular British Ballads Ancient and Modern‎^[3], “Robbie Tamson’s Smiddie”:

     Me mither mend't me auld breeks, / But ay! but they were diddy;

   • 2013, Angela Woolfe, The Surprising Life of Charlie Glass (size 18 and a Bit), →ISBN, page 380:

     There's a pear orchard, and a knot garden, and a diddy little lake that's just big enough to swim in . . . hey, if the weather stays like this, we can have a dip tomorrow.

   • For more quotations using this term, see Citations:diddy.

Synonyms

see Thesaurus:tiny

Etymology 2

Likely from Romani didikai; compare didicoy.

Noun

diddy (plural diddies)

1. (UK, slang) A gypsy.
   • 1943, Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, page 82:

     Real Gypsies despise them and call them ' diddikais — dirty diddies,' and half the sins laid at their door have been committed by these diddikais.

   • 2011, Mary Ellen Dennis, The Greatest Love on Earth, →ISBN, page 90:

     Last month a diddy told my fortune.

   • 2012, Curtis Evans, Masters of the "Humdrum" Mystery, →ISBN:

     To the typical genre reader a diddy would be, to borrow a term from John Dickson Carr, below suspicion.