Beour
A woman or girl, often an attractive one. Used as a noun ('she's a beour') and increasingly in the wider Irish slang vocabulary. Carried into settled speech from Irish Traveller Cant (Shelta) and now heard across Cork, Limerick, and South Armagh.
Etymology
From Shelta, the cryptic language of the Irish Travellers, where 'beour' (also 'beor', 'beure', 'buer') is the standard word for woman. Shelta itself is a centuries-old hybrid of disguised Irish and English, used as in-group speech. The word leaked from Cant into settled Irish slang during the twentieth century, helped by the geographic spread of Traveller families across the country and the everyday contact between settled and Traveller communities at fairs and markets.
In a sentence
"There's a beour above in the shop asking for you."
Historical notes
Beour is one of a small set of Cant-origin words (with feen and rulya among them) that crossed from Traveller speech into settled Irish slang without losing its edge. The settled use ranges from neutral ('there's a beour at the door') to admiring ('serious beour, that one') to crude. Spelling is unsettled because the word arrived from an oral tradition: beour, beor, beure, and buer all appear in print, with 'beour' the most common modern form.
Alternate spellings
beor · beure · buer
Sources
- Wiktionary, entry beour (Hiberno-English slang). · dictionary
- Macalister, R.A.S. The Secret Languages of Ireland. Cambridge University Press, 1937. · academic