A policeman sent a colleague who was house-sitting for him a WhatsApp message: ‘Keep the pikeys out.’ He was sacked and last month failed in his appeal. A reader wrote to me saying he came across the word pikeys in the 1970s in Oxfordshire and ‘understood it to mean dishonest low-life characters, though not necessarily of a specific group like gypsy or other travellers’. He also remembered as a teenager in Cheshire coming across a hayfork being called a pikel, and wonders if the terms are related. They are, but not straightforwardly.
Pikey dates from the second third of the 19th century as pikey-man, meaning a traveller who has come into the locality on the pike or turnpike road. Turnpike roads were toll roads punctuated by turnpikes, a kind of turnstile with a vertical axle and horizontal spokes, or a horizontal bar armed with spikes.
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