Feen
A man or boy. The masculine counterpart of beour. Used as a noun ('grand feen, that one') and across registers from neutral description to mild praise. Heard in Munster, South Armagh, and increasingly in general Irish slang.
Etymology
From Shelta (Irish Traveller Cant), where 'feen' is the standard word for man, almost certainly a disguised form of Irish 'fear'. Shelta's standard disguise mechanisms - reversal, suffixing, vowel shifts - applied to ordinary Irish vocabulary made a cryptic in-group lexicon. 'Feen' is one of the most stable Cant words, attested through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and is among the handful that crossed from Traveller speech into settled Irish slang.
In a sentence
"Who's the tall feen with your sister?"
Historical notes
Feen sits in the same Cant-origin cluster as beour. Settled Irish use ranges from neutral ('there's a feen at the door') through admiring ('serious feen') to dismissive ('some feen'). The word travels with no particular class association now; it is at home in a Cork pub and a Crossmaglen kitchen. The Cant ancestry is invisible to most users, which is how a borrowed word knows it has settled.
Sources
- Collins English Dictionary, entry feen (Hiberno-English slang). · dictionary
- Macalister, R.A.S. The Secret Languages of Ireland. Cambridge University Press, 1937. · academic