What it means
Someone from the countryside, basically anyone who isn't from Dublin, said with varying levels of affection depending on who's saying it. If you're a Dubliner it's a mild jab at country folk. If you're a culchie yourself it's a badge of honour. The word is often linked to Kiltimagh in Mayo or to the Irish word for woods. Either way, it's pure rural Ireland bottled.
Usage examples
"Jaysus, your man's a proper culchie, drove into town on a tractor and parked outside Supermac's like it was the most natural thing"
"The cousin from Donegal arrived at the family wedding in the Powerscourt Hotel in Wicklow last weekend with the unmistakable accent of the rural west of Ireland, three generations of Dublin relatives jokingly called him the culchie of the family, and he wore the title with the calm pride of a man who can name every cow in his father field."
"The new colleague at the marketing agency in the Grand Canal Dock office of Dublin is a culchie from Roscommon, brings homemade scones every Monday morning from the bakery of his hometown, and the entire team has now learned the precise location of three villages of the western seaboard that nobody had ever heard of before September."
Where it comes from
Culchie is the Dublin nickname for any Irish person from outside the capital, attested in the spoken English of the Liberties area of Dublin from the early twentieth century. The most credible etymology traces the word to the town of Kiltimagh in County Mayo, pronounced in Irish as cill-tee-ma, and used by Dubliners as a generic stand-in for any rural Irish town. An alternative theory derives the term from the Irish word coillte, the woods, with the implication of someone who comes from the wooded countryside. The cultural rivalry between Dublin urbanites and the so-called culchies has been a fixture of Irish humour and music since the nineteen-sixties, recurring in the songs of the Dubliners and in the writings of Flann O Brien.
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