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