Lefty

How to spell lefty

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce lefty

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does lefty mean?

1. nounA person who is left-handed, or something designed for the left hand.
2. nounAn informal term for a person who holds left-wing political views.

Lefty in a sentence

• As a lefty, she struggled to find scissors that worked for her.

• The columnist was dismissed by critics as a hopeless lefty with no head for economics.

• The coach valued his pitcher because a lefty gives batters real trouble.

• In that debate the lone lefty argued for higher public spending.

Where does lefty come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a modern, informal coinage built on the everyday word 'left', which descends from the Old English 'lyft', a word that originally meant 'weak' or 'foolish' before it settled into naming the side of the body opposite the right. The casual ending '-y', the same friendly suffix that turns 'sweet' into 'sweetie' or 'tough' into 'toughie', was attached to make a familiar nickname. As a term for a left-handed person it grew up in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, popularised in part by baseball slang for left-handed pitchers. A separate political sense, labelling someone on the left wing of politics, developed through the twentieth century, drawing on the seating arrangement in the French revolutionary assembly where radicals sat to the left. The spelling is straightforward once you remember it simply pins '-y' onto 'left', keeping the silent-feeling 'f' and 't' together.

How the word is built

• left (from Old English lyft, weak/left side)
• -y (informal noun suffix)