Lost Word Of The Day (76)

We are familiar with the term hunk meaning a large piece of something and, informally, a strong, attractive man, but what about hunks or hunx, a word with an unknown origin that appeared in the 17th century? Describing a miser or an ill-natured person it was used by some of the English language’s greatest 19th century writers.

Dickens wrote in The Old Curiosity Shop (1841) “that you become the sole inheritor of this rich old hunks”, while Charles Kingsley, in Two Years Ago (1857), left no one in any doubt as to its meaning; “one fellow comes and borrows my money and goes out and calls me a stingy old hunks because I won’t let him cheat me”. Trollope, in The Way We Live Now (1875), wrote “Crumb had anathematised old Ruggles and his money too, telling him that he was an old hunx”.

The word does not seem to have survived long into the 20th century, by which time we had become rather miserly in our epithets for stinginess.