HAVE A DEKKO

THIS PHRASE means to look, glance (at something).

For example: Let’s have a dekko at your new car.

‘Dekko’ is the usual spelling, but as it is a slang term derived from spoken language, the spelling is somewhat arbitrary; sometimes ‘decko’, sometimes ‘deko’.

The proper spelling, which is virtually never used, is ‘dekho’. The word is one of the numerous examples that the British army harvested during the period of governance of India known as the British Raj (1858 - 1947).

Those words were assimilated into English with their (more or less) correct spelling. The British soldiers also invented other words, formed from mangled mispronunciations of the Urdu or Hindi originals:

Blighty (England) - bilayati (foreign, especially European)

Buckshee (free, without charge) - bakhshi (giver, paymaster)

Choky (jail) - chauki (shed)

‘Dekho’ is a Hindi word meaning ‘look’. The expression first began to be used by the British in India.

The phrase was originally ‘have a deck’, which derived in the same way but which has now gone out of use. ‘Have a dekko’ is first found in 1856 in Allen’s Indian Mail, a newspaper devoted to news of India and China aimed at the families of servicemen stationed there: The natives of the place flock round, with open mouths and straining eyes, to have a dekko

‘Have a dekko’ was (and is) used mostly in the London area.

‘Take a shufti’, yet another London expression with the same meaning, is a better match for ‘have a dekko’, being a foreign word mispronounced by members of the British army, this time from the Arabic word ‘sufti’, meaning ‘have you seen?’.