chav

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Chav appears to come from chavi, the word for “child” in Romany English. While reported in northeast England in the early 1990s, one early written use of chav was on the Usenet group uk.local.kent in 1998, where a user posted: “Traveling from Maidstone to Chatham every day was bad enough. I was born in Brompton so am I a Chav or what?”

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In 2002, chavs appeared in an article in the British Observer, where it was used to refer to girls from Chatham, a town in Kent in South East England, who wore fancy jewelry and were viewed as sexually promiscuous. Due to the link to Chatham, some wrongly claimed chav comes from Chatham average.

Chav spread in the UK in the early 2000s to stereotype a kind of youth, especially males, who wear label sportswear and act in a brash, confrontational manner. The slang wigger is something of an American equivalent, as is ned in Scotland or scanger in Ireland.

In 2004, Oxford Dictionaries named chav their first ever Word of the Year, thrusting it into a greater spotlight.

Neil Turner’s Blog

Chav is controversial, though, as it comes with pejorative class associations and helps fuel class divisions. The slang typically targets lower-class people in the UK. Some characterized the 2011 England riots as an attack by chavs on decent society. Blogs and websites such Chavtowns and iLiveHere “chronicle” poorer neighborhoods that are supposedly home to chavs.