shindy

English

Etymology

Uncertain; compare shinney, shinty. Tentatively suggested to be a compound of the Irish words seinn (“play, sing”) and tí (“house”).

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /ˈʃɪndi/

Noun

shindy (countable and uncountable, plural shindies or shindys)

1. A shindig.
   • 1907, Robert W. Chambers, The Younger Set‎^[1], New York: D. Appleton & Co.:

     She and Eileen are giving a shindy for Gladys—that's Gerald's new acquisition, you know. So if you don't mind butting into a baby-show we'll run down.

   • 1939, John Boynton Priestley, Let the People Sing:

     "Well, from what I hear," Dr. Buckie went on, complacently, "there'll be more shindies. So look out!"

2. (slang) An uproar or disturbance; a spree; a row; a riot.
   • 1848 November – 1850 December, William Makepeace Thackeray, “LXXIII”, in The History of Pendennis. […], volume (please specify |volume=I or II), London: Bradbury and Evans, […], published 1849–1850, →OCLC:

     " […] I've married her. And I know there will be an awful shindy at home."

   • 1886, Jerome K. Jerome, Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow‎^[2]:

     I always do sit with my hands in my pockets except when I am in the company of my sisters, my cousins, or my aunts; and they kick up such a shindy—I should say expostulate so eloquently upon the subject—that I have to give in and take them out—my hands I mean.

   • 1924, Herman Melville, chapter 1, in Billy Budd‎^[3], London: Constable & Co.:

     […] it was like a Catholic priest striking peace in an Irish shindy.

   • 1963, J P Donleavy, A Singular Man, published 1963 (USA), page 264:

     More severe injuries were sustained by a young man who received two stab wounds in the chest from a woman's umbrella.
     One of the lighter moments was related by an unidentified witness whose glass eye fell or was torn out in the hostilities. As he later searched the gutter for his hand made optic, a woman approached and handed it back to him none the worse, saying it had found its way down her cleavage in the shindy.

   • 1984, Oliver Sacks, chapter 2, in A Leg to Stand On, HarperPerennial, published 1993, page 23:

     Nurse Solveig inserted the thermometer and disappeared—disappeared (I timed it) for more than twenty minutes. Nor did she answer my bell, or come back, until I set up a shindy.

3. hockey; shinney
   • 1841, anonymous author, The Living and the Dead: A Letter to the People of England, on the State of their Churchyards‎^[4], London: Whittaker & Co., page 31:

     […] what is even more disgusting still, I have seen children playing at "shindy" in a Churchyard, a skull used as a substitute for a ball, and large fragments of leg or arm-bones in the place of sticks.

4. (US, dialect, dated) A fancy or liking.
   • 1855, Thomas Chandler Haliburton, chapter V, in Nature and Human Nature‎^[5]:

     "Father took a wonderful shindy to her, for even old men can't help liking beauty. […] "