dimber
18th-century British thieves' cant — from Romani 'dimber' (fine, handsome).
Definitions
18th-century British thieves' cant — from Romani 'dimber' (fine, handsome). Used in flash vocabulary to describe a person or thing of admirable quality; the cant equivalent of 'top-notch.' Fell out of use after the 1800s but survives in historical crime fiction and slang dictionaries.
That new waistcoat is proper dimber — where'd you nick it from?
Comments
(obsolete, UK, thieves) Pretty; neat.
“NIN WoLs who are still dimber dambers at heart, my beloved...”
— Bluesky· May 2026
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🇬🇧About British & Irish slang slang
UK and Irish slang — Cockney, Scouse, Geordie, Yorkshire, Glaswegian, Brummie, Welsh, West Country, plus Irish English. Centuries of regional dialects feeding into modern British and Irish street talk.
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Semantically related
- dimber mort81%
Archaic British thieves' cant for an attractive or pretty woman. 'Dimber' meant handsome or pretty in the cant vocabulary of 17th and 18th-century English criminals, while 'mort' was the cant word for a woman. The compound was used admiringly rather than disparagingly, though it belongs entirely to historical criminal slang.
- dimber cove80%
British cant compound: 'dimber' (pretty, fine — from Romani) + 'cove' (fellow, man — a staple of thieves' cant). Together they describe a good-looking or admirable man, used among London's criminal underclass in the 18th century. Francis Grose records it in his 1785 'Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue.'
- dimber cove74%
(obsolete, UK, thieves) A handsome man.
- dimber damber73%
(obsolete, UK, thieves) The leader of a group of thieves or vagrants.