From the M-W Editors
tchotchke was our Word of the Day on 02/28/2013. Hear the podcast!
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Examples of tchotchke in a Sentence
a bedroom with polka-dot curtains, flowery wallpaper, and shelves cluttered with tchotchkes from a lifetime of vacations
Recent Examples of tchotchke from the Web
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On Saturday, July 15, the Silver Room Block Party turned 53rd Street in Hyde Park into a giant outdoor festival, overflowing with live music, pop-up art exhibits, spontaneous dance parties, and vendors selling food, books, clothes, and tchotchkes.
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Fifth Harmony used to tour malls like this: shopped from town to town, crammed between kiosks for tchotchkes and lit by department store signs.
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Elephant ivory is one of the biggest—each year, some 30,000 elephants are killed in Africa to meet demand for ivory, mainly in China, where it’s carved into intricate works of art, jewelry, and tchotchkes.
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Then, on a lark, Neino joined a team that competed at the 2011 Defcon 19 hacking contest in Las Vegas and won a coveted Black Badge, a tchotchke shaped like a skull, almost actual size, designed to hang around the neck.
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In the next room — inside heavy wooden drawers, beneath bubble wrap — were a sample of the tchotchkes that Williams had collected.
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The set looks like the tchotchke aisle at the Salvation Army Store.
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JERUSALEM — There aren't as many Trump tchotchkes or posters visible as when past U.S. presidents have visited Israel for the first time.
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The utility dog vest, the paw-print tchotchkes dangling from nylon leashes, the sensible black office flat with a drab grosgrain bow—those are American accessories.
These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'tchotchke.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.
Did You Know?
Just as trinkets can dress up your shelves or coffee table, many words for "miscellaneous objects" or "nondescript junk" decorate our language. Knickknack, doodad, gewgaw, and whatnot are some of the more common ones. While many such words are of unknown origin, we know that tchotchke comes from the Yiddish tshatshke of the same meaning, and ultimately from a now-obsolete Polish word, czaczko. Tchotchke is a pretty popular word these days, but it wasn't commonly used in English until the 1970s.
Origin and Etymology of tchotchke
Yiddish tshatshke trinket, from obsolete Polish czaczko
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Thesaurus: All synonyms and antonyms for tchotchke
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