What it means
Old-school British slang for an attractive person, usually a woman, the kind of word you’d hear in blokey banter or a dodgy old sitcom. It just means someone’s fit, but it can sound pretty objectifying and a bit sleazy. These days it often gets used half-ironically, like you’re doing a parody of lads-chat rather than chatting someone up.
Usage examples
"Dave spotted some totty near the bar and started smoothing his shirt. I said, calm down, mate, you’ve got crisps in your beard."
"My nan still calls the men reading the news a bit of totty, my granddad rolls his eyes from behind his crossword and pretends he is not also pleased by the compliment."
"The wedding was advertised as a chance to meet some serious totty, in the end the entire dance floor was relatives over sixty doing the conga to Westlife badly."
Where it comes from
Probably from totty as a nineteenth-century pet form of children words, drifting later into Edwardian Cockney slang for a young woman. By the seventies it had filled the lecherous corner of British sitcom dialogue, and now lives mostly in self-aware quotation marks, a wink at the language of the bad old days down the local boozer.
Other ways to say it
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