ghoulies

n pl

British

the testicles. In northern Indian lan-guages gooli means pellet or pill. The word was picked up by British colonial troops at the turn of the 20th century as a euphemism for testicle. This sense was reinforced by a more circuitous route; the gypsies' language, Romany, also adopted the Indian word gooli, from which the English and Australian schoolchildren's word 'gully', for a marble, derived. Mar-bles itself was a common euphemism for the testicles.

► 'The temperature further increased each time we dipped a deep fried fish ball into the special Oh' Boy sauce. "It's enough to take your goolies off", gasped my sister-in-law. ' (Craig Brown, Sunday Times magazine, 8 October 1989)