Also 6 kiddie, Sc. keddie. [f. KID sb.1 + -Y4.]
1. A little kid (young goat).
1579. Spenser, Sheph. Cal., May, 249. Well heard Kiddie all this sore constraint.
1597. Witchcraft, in Spald. Club Misc., I. 129. At thy incumming, the keddie lap vpon the.
1810. Sporting Mag., XXXV. 30. Our poor kiddy … which died yesterday of the shab.
attrib. 1855. Kingsley, Westw. Ho! I. iv. 136. The goats furnished milk and ‘kiddy-pies.’
2. slang. and colloq. A little child. [f. KID sb.1 5.]
1889. ‘R. Boldrewood,’ Robbery under Arms (1890), xx. 145. They’d heard all kinds of rough talk ever since they was little kiddies.
1892. R. Kipling, Barrack-r. Ballads, Route Marchin’, iii. While the women and the kiddies sit an’ shiver in the carts.
3. Thieves’ slang. A professional thief who assumes a ‘flashness’ of dress and manner; one who dresses in a similar style. [cf. KID1 5 b.]
1780. Tomlinson, Slang Past., i. My time, O ye Kiddies, was happily spent.
1812. J. H. Vaux, Flash Dict., Kiddy, a thief of the lower order, who … dresses in the extreme of vulgar gentility.
1823. Byron, Juan, XI. xvii. Poor Tom was once a kiddy upon town.
1863. Cowden Clarke, Shaks. Char., xiv. 362. That such a kiddy should have made his public exit from the Tyburn stage in an embroidered dress, bag-wig, ruffles, and fringed gloves, was befitting his ‘exquisite’ nature.
b. A hat of a form fashionable among ‘kiddies.’
1865. Lond. Rev., 2 Sept., 241/2. The last fashion being a hat, apparently bred between an archdeaconal and a ‘kiddy,’ with a broad ribbon passing in front through a large black buckle.
4. attrib. as adj.: Pertaining to, appropriate to, ‘kiddies’; fashionable among persons of that class.
1805. Sporting Mag., XXVI. 56. The horse-dealer … in the kiddy phrase, had both his eyes closed up.
1823. in Newcastle Daily Jrnl. (1891), 31 March, 3/3. Replete with prime chaunts, rum glees, and kiddy catches.
1836–9. Dickens, Sk. Boz, Making a night of it (1850), 164/2. It was his ambition to do something in the celebrated ‘kiddy’ or stage-coach way.
