Mickey

How to spell mickey

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce mickey

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does mickey mean?

1. nounMockery or teasing, used chiefly in the phrase 'take the mickey out of someone'.
2. nounA small, flask-sized bottle of spirits, typically 375 millilitres (Canadian usage).

Mickey in a sentence

• His colleagues love to take the mickey whenever he wears that bright tie to work.

• He picked up a mickey of rum on the way to the cabin for the weekend.

• She took the mickey out of her brother for getting lost on such a short drive.

• A mickey fits neatly into a coat pocket, unlike a full bottle.

Where does mickey come from?

Language of origin: Hebrew

This word grew out of the Irish name Mickey, a friendly pet form of Michael, which itself comes through Latin Michael from the Hebrew Mikha'el, meaning 'who is like God?'. Because Mick and Mickey were once such common generic nicknames for an ordinary fellow, the name drifted into slang in several directions. The British expression 'take the mickey', meaning to tease or mock someone, is widely thought to be Cockney rhyming slang, with 'Mickey Bliss' standing in for a cruder word, the 'mickey' being the surviving fragment. In North America a 'Mickey Finn' was a drink secretly laced with a drug, an expression said to recall a notorious Chicago saloon keeper of that name around 1900. Canadian usage took yet another turn, where 'mickey' came to mean a small flask-sized bottle of spirits. Since all of these senses descend from the same affectionate spelling of a man's name, the tricky part for writers is simply the soft '-ey' ending rather than '-ie' or '-y'.

How the word is built

• mick- (from the personal name Mick, a pet form of Michael)
• -ey (familiar diminutive ending)