Colleen
A girl or young woman, especially an unmarried one. The anglicised form of Irish 'cailín'. Now a slightly old-fashioned word, found most often in song, in older fiction, and in the names of pubs and racehorses.
Etymology
Direct loan from Irish 'cailín' (girl), itself the diminutive of 'caile' (countrywoman, young woman). The anglicised spelling 'colleen' became standard during the nineteenth century, when Hiberno-English vocabulary was widely adopted into popular English-language ballads and into print. The Foclóir Gaeilge-Béarla entry for 'cailín' confirms the same range of senses preserved in the English borrowing.
In a sentence
Down a boreen green came a sweet colleen / And she smiled as she passed me by - Star of the County Down, traditional, c. 1900
And what kind of a colleen was it that he saw? - Cassell's Magazine, 1906
Historical notes
Colleen is one of the small group of Irish-derived English words that have travelled out of everyday speech into the territory of sentimental cliché. The folk song 'Star of the County Down' opens with 'Down a boreen green came a sweet colleen', and that line is most non-Irish speakers' first encounter with the word. In modern Irish English use, 'colleen' is rarer than 'girl' or 'young one'; the word's main life now is in song lyrics, novels with period settings, and the names of small businesses.
Sources
- Oxford English Dictionary, entry colleen n. · dictionary
- Foclóir Gaeilge-Béarla (Ó Dónaill), entry cailín. · dictionary