Kinchin

Word of the Day for Monday, February 11, 2013

Kinchin \kin-chin\, noun:

a child.

He's naught but a kinchin, no bigger than a sparrow.
-- Joan Aiken, The Whispering Mountain

Now I come to think of it, Kinchin is English too. In Oliver Twist the boys who work for Fagin are taught to be kinchins and prig people's wipes.
-- Angela Thirkell, Caroline Alice Lejeune, Three Score and Ten

Derived from the German kindchen, kinchin is a diminutive form of kind meaning "child." Kindchen entered the lexicon in the last decade of the 1600s.

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