The Complete Meaning of “Wotcher”

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Many people think that accents are what other people have. This makes sense, because you’re so used to your own voice it’s hard to think that it might be different to other people.

Accents, however, are like opinions: Everybody has one.

There’s no reason to be upset by this. The different accents we use to speak English are part of what makes it so interestingly varied, and over time many words that existed only in a specific dialect come to be used much more widely.

In some cases, though, words are so tied to a specific place that they immediately make you think of a specific accent.

One of the words that does this well is “wotcher.”
 
 

What does “wotcher” mean, and where does it come from?

“Wotcher” (sometimes spelled “wotcha”) is a British English word that’s similar in meaning to “What’s up?” In other words, it’s a friendly, casual greeting. The word is strongly connected with the early 1900s, and the Cockney dialect of southern London in particular. However, it has actually been around since at least the late 1300s, and has its origins in a corruption of the Middle English phrase “what chere” (“what cheer”).
 

The meaning of “wotcher”

Put simply, “wotcher” means, “hello, how are you?” Another translation into standard English might be, “hello, what’s going on?”

If you’re American, you might be wondering how you get to “wotcher” from either of those phrases. We’ll get to this later, but it’s worth considering that American English also has some odd phrases that are used in a similar way.

The phrase “What’s up?” is a great example, and as uniquely American as “wotcher” is English. Those of you who lived through the 1990s and early 2000s might even remember the then-popular “Whazza?”, which is an abbreviated version of this still-common question.

If it’s helpful, any time you see “Wotcher?” you can translate it into your head as “What’s up?”
 

How do you use wotcher in a sentence?

Just like “What’s up?”, “wotcher” can be a sentence all on its own.

It’s also pretty common to hear this word used immediately before somebody’s name, or another word used to make it clear that a sentence is being used to address somebody.

Whether it’s alone or followed by something else, sentences with “wotcher” usually end with a question mark. However, just like you can say “What’s up!”, “Wotcher” can be followed by a period or exclamation mark.

You’re not really asking how someone is, after all. You’re just being polite and saying “hi.”
 

Examples

“Wotcher, friend?”

“Wotcher!”
“Afternoon to you, too.”

In these examples, you could easily substitute any other greeting for the word “wotcher.”

This really makes it clear that “wotcher” means “hello” or “how are you?”

Note that the first example uses a question mark, while the second uses an exclamation mark, instead. Both are fine.
 

Where does “wotcher” come from?

These days, the word “wotcher” has a pretty strong connection with the southern parts of London.

As a result, many people think “wotcher” originates in Cockney rhyming slang, a type of cant where common words are referred to through using a different pair of rhyming words (for example, “uncle Ned” means “bed”).

However, “wotcher” isn’t actually rhyming slang at all. The truth is much more interesting, and also much older.
 

Middle English: the confused origins of English

The first uses of wotcher come to us all the way from Middle English, an early predecessor of modern English spoken primarily between the late 11th century all the way to the late 15th century.

Even today, English contains many French and German phrases, as well as words from other languages. Middle English was the same way, but with rocket boosters on.

That’s because, for the most part, it actually was a direct mixture of Norman French and the Germanic languages spoken by the Anglo-Saxons who ruled the British Isles before the Norman French forces of William the Conqueror defeated them in 1066.

The strange mix of languages in Middle English makes reading it an interesting experience if you’re only familiar with 21st-century English.

A lot of the words seem almost right, but off in strange ways. If you happen to also speak French and German, the language is particularly fascinating, as it’s often possible to pick out the predecessors of words from each language in the same sentence as one another.

The confusion of Middle English is made worse by the fact that spelling was by and large optional for much of the middle ages, with many authors just sort of sounding words out and putting them on the page any which way.

The phrase “wotcher” is a great example.
 

“What chere?” in Middle English

The true origin of “wotcher” is the Middle English phrase “what chere.”

This looks a little like a misspelling of “cheer,” and in fact that is one of the meanings of this word. Others include “frame of mind” or “feeling” more generally.

According to the Middle English dictionary maintained by the University of Michigan, the word “chere” is also seen in a lot of stock phrases in Middle English, such as “taken chere on honde” (“take heart,” literally “take cheer in hand”) and “god chere” (“good cheer”).

Another of these phrases is “what chere,” which means essentially “How are you?” or, more literally “Of what cheer (mind) are you?”

This phrase appears in a ton of Middle English poems and plays, and is the actual origin of the word “wotcher.”

It’s also where “wotcher” gets its meaning of “what’s up?” or “how are you?”
 Examples

“Mankynde: Ye be welcom, New Gyse! Ser, what chere wyth yow?”
“New Gyse: Well ser, I have no cause to morn”

This exchange is from the anonymous 15th century morality play, “Mankind,” which can be read for free at TEAMS Middle English Texts.

Translated into modern English, it reads something like this:

“Mankind: Be welcome, New Guise! Sir, how are you doing?”
“New Guise: Well, sir, I have no reason to complain.”

The names of the characters are allegorical, with “new guise” meaning something like “novelty,” and being one of the four worldly temptations out to send Mankind to an early, unsaintly end.

“Mak: A, Gyll, what chere?
It is I, Mak, youre husbande.”

“Mak: Ah, Gill, what’s going on?
It is I, Mak, your husband.”

This dialogue is from “The Shepherds,” one of the so-called Towneley Plays due to the owners of the manuscript on which they were found. This play is a little later than “Mankind,” likely belonging to the mid 1500s.
 

‘ello, Mr. Chevalier: Wotcher goes to London

If “wotcher” dates from the 1400s and was originally used by just about everybody, why is it so strongly associated with people in the lower classes in London?

To understand that, we need to jump forward in time to the Victorian period (roughly 1837-1901).

During this time period, London was a bustling metropolis, a center of industry and commerce with huge numbers of poverty-stricken residents as well as more well-off aristocrats and government servants.

During the Great Fire of London (1777), large parts of the city burnt down, and were essentially rebuilt from scratch afterward.

As part of this, one of the city’s major food markets, which had previously been located in a central location convenient to working-class Londoners, moved to the less accessible outskirts.

Enter the “coster,” or “costermonger,” a kind of wondering food salesman. Costers bought food at the main marketplace and carried it with them in baskets or wagons to where the poor of London lived and worked.

They also bought with them unique dialects and sayings, and a singsong chant to sell their wares.

It’s during this time that “wotcher” became more associated with London, and working-class individuals in particular.

By the late 1800s, costers were established enough that they were appearing as comedic characters in musical shows, parodied by singers for laughs.

The most famous of these singers, Alfred Chevalier, released a number of well-known songs about costers in unusual situations.

One of his songs, “Wot Cher! or Knok’d ’em in the Old Kent Road,” is about a lower-class Londoner who inherits his rich uncle’s donkey shay, a type of cart.

Because of his newfound status as self-described “carriage folk,” the neighbors on the street consider him a wealthy individual in his own right, as seen in the chorus, which begins with a rowdy “Wot cher!”

Because of Chevalier’s fame, and the prevalence of the costers he imitated, the phrase “wotcher” became well established as a working-class London greeting by the close of the 19th century.
 

Examples

“Wot cher!” all the neighbours cried,
“Who’re yer goin’ to meet Bill?
Have yer bought the street Bill?”

These are the first three lines of the chorus from “Wot Cher!”

The entire song is written in this dialect, with nonstandard spellings like “yer” for “you’re,” as well as the “Wot cher!” at the beginning of this section.

Note that here, the greeting is split across two words, representing somewhat of a halfway point between the older Middle English phrase and the “wotcher” that exists today.
 

Do people still say wotcher?

You might guess from the example of Arthur Chevalier that “wotcher” is an old-fashioned kind of phrase that had its peak in the early 1900s and doesn’t really exist any more in real life.

For the most part, that’s an accurate statement. However, a surprising number of people have been saying “wotcher” again lately, at least if its appearance in books is any judge.

Google Books Ngram viewer allows us to see the frequency of a word in printed books over time. The Ngram for “wotcher” does indeed show a small bump in the 1870s, presumably when the word first appeared, followed by much larger peaks in the early 1900s and the 1930s.

Although the word then decreased in popularity, it never entirely went away, with smaller peaks indicating high usage in the 1960s and 1980s.

Starting around the year 2000, though, the word “wotcher” took off, and as of 2019 (the latest dates in the Google Books Ngram corpus), the word had reached significantly higher usage than it ever had in the early 1900s.

Of course, not all of these uses are “wotcher” as a greeting.

Some are purposeful misspellings of “watcher,” while others are written approximations of “what are you doing?” (“wotcher doin?”).

All the same, there are a number of uses of “wotcher” as a greeting, whether they’re in fiction set in rural England, in books of slang, or even in plays and poems.

None of this necessarily means people say “wotcher” all the time in real life, if at all. But it does suggest that the word has an important role in the British cultural imagination.

Separately, anecdotal evidence from Internet forums and question-and-answer websites implies that a lot of people really do still say “wotcher” today in various parts of the UK.

 

Conclusion

The word “wotcher” dates all the way back to the 1400s. However, today it’s more commonly associated with working-class individuals in the south of London.

Although the word is still in regular use, it probably isn’t something you should add to your own vocabulary unless you happen to be English yourself, and want to give the impression that you’re from a working-class background.