Meaning
Shameless, unshakeable audacity: the nerve to do or demand something outrageous while showing no embarrassment at all. Ranges from admiring, for bold self-confidence, to damning, for sheer gall. The Yiddish and Hebrew source words lean more consistently toward insolence and impudence than the often complimentary English use. Informal-to-standard; admiring or damning depending on context, and still flavoured by its Yiddish-English background. Regional use: General English, informal to standard (borrowed from Yiddish).
Origin
From Yiddish khutspe ('impudence, gall'), taken from Hebrew chutspeh, a Mishnaic-era word for insolence. Merriam-Webster traces English use back to 1867, while the Online Etymology Dictionary dates it to 1892, a small discrepancy that reflects how recently the word was fully naturalised. It circulated in American Jewish English for decades before breaking into general American usage in the later 20th century, a spread helped by Leo Rosten's The Joys of Yiddish (1968), whose illustration of the concept, the defendant who kills his parents and then begs the court for mercy as an orphan, became the word's signature joke definition.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- chutzpa
- hutzpa
- hutzpah
- khutspe (Yiddish-style spelling)
Usage Examples
- It takes real chutzpah to ask the committee for extra funding after missing two deadlines.
- He had the chutzpah to critique the very report he had refused to read.
- You have to admire the chutzpah of a startup that pitches itself as the industry standard on day one.