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From: "Gordon Barlow" <>
Subject: [ABOUT-WORDS] Tyke
Date: Sun, 05 Aug 2007 12:29:33 -0500


Here are some personal speculations and musings.

The word may be related to Old Norse "dugga" meaning a
wretch or a low fellow, from which may derive "dog" in its
slang, pejorative sense - Australian "dag". "Tyke" might
be a simple dialectal variant of those two words - used
pejoratively by early Church of England Catholics to mean
"ROMAN Catholic". It may conceivably have been used
self-mockingly by Yorkshiremen of themselves - or (more
likely, perhaps) have come into use at the time of the
Pilgrimage of Grace, when much of northern England
rebelled in the name of the old religion against the first
non-RC king of England, Henry VIII.

Tyke meaning small-boy may be a variant of "toy". My
dictionary's earliest reference for "toy" is the 1500s,
which may point to "tyke" as being the origin. Perhaps it
connoted someone of little importance - a dag/dog/dawg in
one Northern accent or another. Compare "scrap" as in
"poor little scrap".

Gordon

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