dimber mort
Archaic British thieves' cant for an attractive or pretty woman.
Definitions
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.
The bawdy song described a dimber mort who had the whole tavern under her spell.
Comments
(archaic, UK, thieves) A pretty girl.
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- dimber81%
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.
- dimber81%
(obsolete, UK, thieves) Pretty; neat.
- dimber cove74%
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.'
- ben mort71%
17th–18th century English thieves' cant compound: 'ben' (good) plus 'mort' (woman, from cant slang). The word 'mort' itself derives from older gypsy/Romani cant. 'Ben mort' could mean a respectable woman or, in context, a desirable female accomplice in criminal circles.