Josh

How to spell josh

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce josh

What does josh mean?

1. verbTo tease or make fun of someone in a good-natured, playful way.

Josh in a sentence

• The older staff like to josh the new recruits about their first-day nerves.

• His brothers always josh him about his terrible parallel parking.

Where does josh come from?

Language of origin: Unknown

Josh is an American coinage that first appears in print around the 1840s, and its exact source has never been pinned down. The most popular guess connects it to the personal name Joshua, perhaps echoing the homespun humour of the fictional Yankee character Josh Billings (the pen name of the nineteenth-century humourist Henry Wheeler Shaw), though the slang seems to predate his fame. Another reasonable theory treats it as a playful blend or alteration of the word 'joke', which would explain its meaning of teasing in fun. Whatever its root, it spread quickly through informal American speech and crossed into British and Canadian use as a light, friendly term for kidding someone. Because the spelling is short and phonetic, the only real trap is remembering it ends in 'sh' rather than the harder 'tch' sound some speakers hear. Its murky beginnings are typical of folksy slang that lived in conversation long before anyone bothered to write it down.

How the word is built

• josh (whole word; origin uncertain, possibly an alteration of 'joke' or from the personal name Joshua)