Pikey

Pikey or "pikie" is a slang term, which may be pejorative when so intended but not necessarily so, used mainly in England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales to refer to people who are of the Traveller Community, In a pejorative sense it means "a lower-class person", perhaps 'coarse' or 'disreputable'.

It is not well received among Irish Travellers or Romas, as it is considered an ethnic slur.

There is some evidence to suggest that forms of the term existed in medieval literature. In Robert Henryson's Fable Collection (late 15th century), in the fable of the Two Mice, the thieving mice are referred to on more than one occasion as 'pykeris':

'And in the samin thay went, but mair abaid, Withoutin fyre or candill birnand bricht For commonly sic pykeris luffis not lycht.'

The term is strongly associated with itinerant life and constant travel: pikey is directly derived from pike which, c. 1520, meant to "go away from, to go on" and related to the words turnpike (toll-road) and pike-man (toll-collector).

Charles Dickens in 1837 writes disparagingly of itinerant pike-keepers.

The Oxford English Dictionary traced the earliest use of "pikey" to The Times in August 1838, which referred to strangers who had come to the Isle of Sheppey as "pikey-men". In 1847, J. O. Halliwell in his Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words recorded the use of "pikey" to mean a gypsy. In 1887, W. D. Parish and W. F. Shaw in the Dictionary of Kentish Dialect recorded the use of the word to mean "a turnpike traveller; a vagabond; and so generally a low fellow".

Its Kentish usage became more widespread, as it was also used to include all of the travelling groups who came to the county as "pickers" in the summertime of fruit and hops.

Thomas Acton's Gypsy Politics and Social Change notes John Camden Hotten's Slang Dictionary (1887) as similarly stating:

Hotten's dictionary of slang gives pike at as go away and Pikey as a tramp or a Gypsy. He continues a pikey-cart is, in various parts of the country, one of those habitable vehicles suggestive of country life. Possibly the term has some reference to those who continually use the pike or turnpike road.

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