Chic

Chic (; French: [ʃik]), meaning "stylish" or "smart", is an element of fashion. It was originally a French word.

Etymology Chic is a French word, established in English since at least the 1870s. Early references in English dictionaries classified it as slang and New Zealand-born lexicographer Eric Partridge noted, with reference to its colloquial meaning, that it was "not so used in Fr[ench]." Gustave Flaubert notes in Madame Bovary (published in 1856) that "chicard" (one who is chic) is then Parisian very current slang for "classy" noting, perhaps derisively, perhaps not, that it was bourgeois. There is a similar word in German, schick, with a meaning similar to chic, which may be the origin of the word in French; another theory links chic to the word chicane. Although the French pronunciation (/ˈʃiːk/ or "sheek") is now virtually standard and was that given by Fowler, chic was often rendered in the anglicised form of "chick".

In a fictional vignette for Punch (c. 1932) Mrs F. A. Kilpatrick attributed to a young woman who 70 years later would have been called a "chavette" the following assertion: "It 'asn't go no buttons neither ... That's the latest ideer. If you want to be...