‘Dosh’ is British slang for money, especially ready cash. It is a general-purpose word rather than a particular sum: you earn dosh or find yourself short of it. The tone is informal and faintly comic, and it sits alongside lolly, wonga, readies and the rest of Britain’s unusually crowded stock of money slang.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘dosh’?
For a word this common, ‘dosh’ is remarkably poorly documented. The standard dictionaries do not even attempt a story: Collins and its licensees settle for ‘C20: of unknown origin’, and the Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest evidence for the word is from 1953, in the writing of H. Clevely.
The early 1950s dating fits the word’s feel. Anthony Buckeridge’s school story Jennings Follows a Clue, first published in 1951, has a boy announce that he is ‘a bit short of dosh’ and then immediately translate the word as ‘money’ for his listener, which suggests it was current in playgrounds but still new enough to need a gloss. (Green’s Dictionary of Slang, which supplies that citation, quotes a later edition, so the exact wording may belong to a reviser.)
The surprise is that Green’s also finds the word a century earlier, in America. The Boston Satirist of 1843 has ‘If you have the dosh, you can come in’, and an 1850 Boston paper offers ‘That’s a mighty sight of dosh’. On Green’s account the term appeared in the United States around 1850, vanished, and then re-emerged in Britain in the 1950s. Whether the two outbreaks are connected, or the word was simply coined twice, nobody has established.
As for where it came from, there are three stock theories and no proof for any of them. Green’s tentatively connects it to ‘doss’, the tramp’s word for a bed or a night’s sleep, familiar from ‘doss house’; in some British dialects dosh and doss were interchangeable, so dosh would originally have been the money needed for a night’s shelter. Tony Thorne’s Dictionary of Contemporary Slang records the rival candidate ‘dash’, a West African trading term for a tip or bribe, which servicemen and traders could have brought home. There are also blend theories, deriving it from dough plus cash, or dollars plus cash, which have the look of guesswork after the event.
Thorne also traces the word’s modern career: a working-class term of the early 1950s that was fading by the 1960s, then revived in the money-conscious late 1980s, when it became a favourite of alternative comedians and professional cockneys. It has stayed in circulation ever since, an all-purpose word for money whose paper trail runs out just where it gets interesting.