Meaning & use

Pickney

noun·Everyday

Last updated

A child, especially in Jamaican and wider Caribbean English.

See it in a sentence

Every pickney in the yard came running when the ice cream truck rang its bell.

She raised four pickney on her own after her husband passed.

A note on using this word

A Caribbean Creole word rooted in the same etymology as 'pickaninny', but widely used today in Jamaican Patois simply to mean 'child', without the offensive connotations that word carries in American English.

Words with a similar meaning

childkid

Choose a synonym to suit the sentence. Meanings can overlap without being identical.

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