dink

n

1.

a silly person, fool or eccentric. The word has been used especially by chil-dren and young people in both Britain and America, although possibly coined separately in each.

2.

a South-East Asian person. The racist term, probably an arbitrary alteration of chink, has been applied in Australia to people of Chinese origin and in the USA to Japanese and Vietnamese.

3.

also dinky

American

one of a childless yuppie couple; an acronym for 'double (or dual) income, no kids', coined in New York in 1986. Dink is an example of the American use of acronyms to describe social subgroups. This tendency, which produced WASP, JAP and, later, yuppies in the 1970s, became a vogue among New Yorkers in the mid-1980s. In spite of enthusiastic use by some journalists and imitation by their London counterparts, this term, like guppy, has achieved only limited currency.

► 'Take Dink, for instance, which I always thought meant idiot. The other day I heard a girl refer to a yuppie couple as "dinks".' (Evening Standard, 22 January 1987)

4a.

American

the penis. A fairly rare teenage term.

4b.

American

nothing at all. In this sense the equivalent of dick.