Blade
A girl or young woman, in Tyrone informal speech. 'A wee blade' = a young girl. The word is specifically County Tyrone and rarely heard elsewhere in Ulster, let alone outside Northern Ireland.
Etymology
Origin uncertain. Possibly a metaphorical extension from 'blade' (= a young man, in older standard English use of 'a young blade') applied to women instead. The Tyrone-specific narrowing is a small piece of Ulster's local vocabulary geography: words that travelled with families through a single county and went no further. The form is Tyrone-specific.
In a sentence
"A wee blade from up the road - she'll be in your class at the secondary."
Historical notes
Blade is one of the most county-specific items in this dictionary. Speakers from Tyrone use it freely; speakers from Down or Antrim usually have not heard it; speakers from Donegal might know it through family connections. The gender-flip from the older 'a young blade' (a young man) is unusual; most regional slang shifts in the opposite direction. Whether the Tyrone form is a parallel coinage or a reanalysis of the same older root is not settled.
Sources
- Macafee, Caroline. A Concise Ulster Dictionary. Oxford University Press, 1996. · dictionary