dimber cove
British cant compound: 'dimber' (pretty, fine — from Romani) + 'cove' (fellow, man — a staple of thieves' cant).
Definitions
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.'
The landlady called him a proper dimber cove and poured his ale before he'd even asked.
Comments
(obsolete, UK, thieves) A gentleman.
Comments
(obsolete, UK, thieves) A handsome man.
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- dimber80%
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.
- dimber76%
(obsolete, UK, thieves) Pretty; neat.
- dimber mort74%
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.