Wheeker
Excellent. Brilliant. The standard Belfast superlative for something that has gone very well: a wheeker night, a wheeker goal, a wheeker idea. The Northern Irish equivalent of 'cracking' or 'brilliant', with a particular Belfast flavour.
Etymology
From Scots 'wheech' / 'wheeker', a working positive adjective in Scots and Ulster Scots. The form's exact derivation is uncertain - DSL traces it through informal Scots speech without committing on origin. The agent-noun '-er' ending suggests the word started as something that wheeches - a wheeker - and broadened to mean anything excellent.
In a sentence
"The match was an absolute wheeker - never saw a better last ten minutes."
Historical notes
Wheeker is one of the most distinctively Belfast Ulster Scots words in modern speech. The Northern Ireland Tourist Board has run advertising campaigns built around the word; Belfast football commentary uses it freely; school-age speakers in the North say 'wheeker' the way their peers elsewhere say 'class' or 'sound'. The word stops short of leaving Northern Ireland - in the Republic 'wheeker' would mark the speaker as a Northerner.
Sources
- Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DSL), entry WHEECH / WHEEKER. · dictionary
- Macafee, Caroline. A Concise Ulster Dictionary. Oxford University Press, 1996. · dictionary