Cor blimey is a British exclamation of surprise or anger. It is a minced oath, a softening of God blind me, and the shortened form blimey was in print by 1883. Cor is itself a euphemism for God, so the phrase muffles the oath twice over.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘Cor blimey’?
‘Cor blimey’ is a euphemism (specifically a minced oath) derived from ‘God blind me’.
Blimey is recorded in print in Barrère and Leland’s A dictionary of slang, jargon and cant, 1889. The extended version was used, by Arthur Morrison in A Child of the Jago, 1896:
“Gawblimy, not what?”
The line runs in full: ‘Not wot? Gawblimy, not what? Shutcher mouth.’ Morrison had used the same form two years earlier, in his collection Tales of Mean Streets, which Green’s Dictionary of Slang dates to 1894: ‘If y’ don’t give me the money, gawblimy, I’ll do for ye!’
The link between ‘gor blimey’ or ‘cor blimey’ and ‘god blind me’ was made evident by James Joyce in Ulysses, 1922:
God blimey if she aint a clinker [a good looking woman]
Being as it is, a contraction of ‘God blind me’, the term was originally spelled ‘gorblimey’ and is still frequently used that way.
Barrère and Leland’s entry offers no derivation of its own. It reads, in full, ‘Blimey (common), an apparently meaningless, abusive term.’ Etymonline takes that same 1889 dictionary as the first attestation of the word and calls it ‘probably a corruption of (God) blind me!’.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang has an example six years older than the dictionary record. Green’s derives blimey! from the oath ‘God blind me!’ and glosses it as ‘an excl. denoting surprise or disbelief’, and its earliest citation is from The Sportsman of Melbourne, 29 August 1883, in the spelling blimy: ‘Blimy d’you think I didn’t know it?’
The unminced original is on record too. Green’s opens its entry for gorblimey! with a bracketed line from the Proceedings of the Old Bailey for 15 December 1879: ‘It was not Shea who said God blind me you can’t do me’. The earliest softened example in that entry comes from F. W. Carew’s Autobiography of a Gipsey, 1891.
Green’s files cor blimey! and cor blimy! as variants under the headword gorblimey!, alongside gaw bli me!, gawblimey!, gawd blimey!, God blimey! and lorblime!, and glosses the whole group as ‘a mild, euphemistic oath, lit. God blind me!’. In its dated examples the gor and gaw spellings run from 1891 onwards, while the earliest spelled with cor is dated about 1921, from Tom Norman’s The Penny Showman: ‘Cor blimy, if that ain’t old mother Parker, Seventy if she’s a day, and blind as a bat!’
Cor also works as an oath on its own, without blimey attached. Green’s gives it a separate entry, ‘a euph. for God!’, with a first example from J. B. Priestley’s Angel Pavement, 1930. It is the same move as the gaw of gawblimey: a harmless syllable put where God would go.
James Ware’s Passing English of the Victorian Era, 1909, puts the word in the street well before any of those printings. He enters it as ‘Gawblimy (Street, 1870)’ and describes it as a ‘Ceaseless apostrophe by the lower orders to heaven, in reference to some declaration.’ He then takes it apart: ‘This is Gaw Bli Me. Gaw from the street shape of the word God’, with bli an ellipsis and me the object of it. Ware’s entry carries no printed example for that 1870 date.
The Cambridge Dictionary marks cor blimey! as UK, old-fashioned slang and defines it as ‘a way of expressing surprise or anger’, with the example ‘Cor blimey, I didn’t see you there!’
The phrase gave its name to Cor, Blimey!, an ITV comedy drama of 2000 written and directed by Terry Johnson, about the relationship between Sid James and Barbara Windsor.