Definitions

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun A teenage or late-adolescent girl.

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Borrowing from German Backfisch ("teenage girl”, literally “fish for frying").

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Examples

  • I wish I could see myself as you see me -- foreshortened into a backfisch.

    Howards End 1924

  • In English there is flapper, in French there is ingénue, and in German there is backfisch.

    Chapter 11. American Slang. 1. Its Origin and Nature Henry Louis 1921

  • The orchestra plays Grieg and Moszkowski; a smell of chocolate is in the air; that tall, pink lieutenant over there, with his cropped head and his outstanding ears, his _backfisch_ waist and his mudscow feet -- that military gargoyle, half lout and half fop, offends the roving eye.

    Europe After 8:15 George Jean Nathan 1920

  • She didn't believe for one moment in starving Germans, but these certainly did not look so prosperous and buxom as a pre-war German mother and _backfisch_ would have looked.

    Dangerous Ages Rose Macaulay 1919

  • In revenge, the _backfisch_ coughed and sneezed "all over the carriage," as Mrs. Hilary put it, "in the disgusting German way," and her mother made noises as if she could be sick if she tried hard enough.

    Dangerous Ages Rose Macaulay 1919

  • These were a mother and a _backfisch_, and they looked shyly and sullenly at Mrs. Hilary and the other English-woman in the compartment.

    Dangerous Ages Rose Macaulay 1919

  • The German mother broke out in angry remonstrance, indicating that she had neuralgia and the _backfisch_ a cold in the head.

    Dangerous Ages Rose Macaulay 1919

  • A blond woman, wearing the Imperial crown and with her hair braided in pigtails like a German _backfisch_, is whirling in the tango with a skeleton partner.

    Raemaekers' Cartoons With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers Louis Raemaekers 1912

  • I wish I could see myself as you see me -- foreshortened into a backfisch.

    Howards End Forster, E. M. 1910

  • She resented the kind of quasi-guardianship that this clever _backfisch_ assumed towards her, though she knew it meant that Nora had fallen in love with her.

    Lady Connie Humphry Ward 1885

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