Wordorigins.org

Plugged dates to the 1880s. Back when coins actually contained valuable metal, it was a counterfeiting practice to remove the silver or other valuable metal from the center of the coin and replace it with a plug of lead or other base metal. From the 26 September 1883 Indiana Weekly Messenger:

All that was found in the shape of money was a plugged quarter.

And we have plugged nickel from the 1930s. From Carl Sandburg’s 1936 The People, Yes:

He seems to think he’s the frog’s tonsils but he looks to me like a plugged nickel.

Why did plugged nickel catch on and other denominations of coin not? Early citations tend to favor plugged quarters, but in cases like this there often is no reason. Why one choice is favored over another is unknown. One possible choice just catches on.

(Source: Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd Edition)

Pipe dream is US slang dating from the 1890s. It’s a reference to smoking opium and having fantastic hallucinations. From the Chicago Daily Tribune of 11 December 1890:

It [flying] has been regarded as a pipe-dream for a good many years.

The word pipe has been used as a synonym for opium smoking since the mid-19th century. From Robert Fortune’s 1847 Three Years’ Wanderings in the Northern Provinces of China:

These infatuated people may be seen...laughing and talking wildly under the effects of a first pipe.

(Source: Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd Edition)

The origin of pizzazz is unknown. It dates to 1930s U.S. slang. The earliest known use is from the March 1937 edition of Harper’s Bazaar:

Pizazz, to quote the editor of the Harvard Lampoon, is an indefinable dynamic quality, the je ne sais quoi of function; as for instance, adding Scotch puts pizazz into a drink. Certain clothes have it, too...There’s pizazz in this rust evening coat.

Earlier use in the Harvard Lampoon seems likely, but has not been found.

There is an earlier use of pizzazz, in a different sense. From the 7 December 1913 Mansfield [Ohio] News:

Brother Russell declared, bo, that his crowd had already framed it up with some of the big guys in the music world to put the kibosh on this line of junk, and that it was only a question of time before they would have such pieces as “When I Get You Alone Tonight” completely on the pizzazz.

What relation this musical slang usage has with the more modern one is uncertain.

(Sources: Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd Edition; ADS-L)

Buy a pig in a poke is a confusing phrase to many, mainly because people aren’t quite sure what is meant by poke. Poke is a dialectal term for bag or sack; in the US, the word tends to be found in the Appalachian region. So to buy a pig in a poke is make a blind purchase, to buy something sight unseen. The word poke dates to c.1300 when it appears in The Lay of Havelok the Dane:

Hise pokes fulle of mele an korn.
(His pokes are full of meal and corn.)

The ultimate origin of pig is a bit of mystery. One would expect a word like pig to appear in Old English and have a common Germanic root; the expected form would be *picga or *pigga. But the word does not appear in the extant Old English manuscripts, except in one case, the compound picbred, pig-bread or food for pigs. There is also a 12th century surname of Pigman, which may be related.

The common Germanic root for the animal is swin, or swine as we use it today. This word is common in Old English, while *picga is vanishingly rare. There are also no cognates in other Germanic languages, unless one counts the Dutch big, which also means pig. But the shift from /p/ to /b/ between English and Dutch does not follow any known phonetic pattern. A /p/ in English should remain a /p/ in Dutch. So this just adds to the confusion about the word.

Picnic comes to us from the French pique-nique. The original French meaning, first appearing in 1694 in the form repas à piquenique, referred to a meal where everyone contributed either food or money, a pot-luck meal. In modern French usage, the term has adopted the English sense of a meal eaten as part of an outing of some sort.

The first element in the French term, pique, is similar to the English pick. Both can mean to eat, in particular to eat in small, dainty mouthfuls. Nique originally had a meaning of nothing and later came to be used to mean a small coin. Undoubtedly chosen because it is reduplicative with pique, it can be interpreted to mean a trifle. So a picnic is a meal of small items or delicacies.

Picnic makes its English appearance in 1748 in a letter by the 4th Earl of Chesterfield:

I like the description of your pic-nic, where I take it for granted that your cards are only to break the formality of a circle.

But English use of picnic did not become widespread until around 1800.

Folklore has the origin of this word as lynching party for blacks in the American South, deriving from the phrase pick an nigger. This is absolutely incorrect. The word’s origin is in Europe, has no racial overtones whatsoever, and, as we have seen, long predates the practice of lynching blacks.

(Source: Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd Edition)

In standard English, piccaninny is a derogatory word for a black child. In some dialects, specifically some Caribbean dialects, the word does not have the derogatory connotation and can even be a term of endearment, but this is not the case in standard English.

This word is a West Indian variation on the Portuguese pequenino, meaning boy or child and in older use meaning small or tiny. The Portuguese word is cognate with the Spanish pequeño. The word entered the West Indian vocabulary via Portuguese trading pidgins that were common in the Caribbean of the 17th century.

English use of the word dates to the mid-17th century. There is this from 1653, published in Notes & Queries in 1905, referring to workers, presumably slaves, in Barbados:

Some women, whose pickaninnies are three yeares old, will, as they worke at weeding...suffer the hee Pickaninnie, to sit astride upon their backs.

By the early 19th century, the term had spread to Australia and New Zealand where it was used to refer to Aboriginal and Maori children. From the Sydney Gazette of 4 January 1817:

Governor,—that will make good Settler—that’s my Pickaninny!

And from J.L. Nicholas’s Narrative of a Voyage to New Zealand, also from 1817:

This fellow...met me...telling me that Mrs. King had got a pickeeninnee, (a child,) he began to describe her groans...while...under the pains of labour.

(Source: Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd Edition)

This is an American slang word of that dates to the late 19th century. It probably comes from fawney, a slang term of earlier vintage, which in turn is from the Irish fáine, or ring. Fawney also lent its name to a confidence game, referred to as the fawney rig or going on the fawney. From George Parker’s 1781 A View of Society and Manners in High and Low Life:

There is a large shop in London where these kind of rings are sold, for the purpose of going on the Fawney.

The Florida vote-counting debacle during the 2000 US presidential election brought the rather obscure and obsolescent word chad to the attention of the public. A chad is that bit of paper left behind when punch cards and paper tape are perforated. Since by 2000 most of the computing world had abandoned punch cards and paper tape, the term had fallen out of use except in specialized applications such as voting.

The origin of the word is unknown. There are several possibilities and a couple of commonly touted explanations that are almost certainly false. While chads have been with us since the automated machinery was introduced into 18th century textile mills at the beginning of the industrial revolution, the word chad itself is relatively new and the name appears toward the end of the technology’s life cycle.

A sawbuck is a ten-dollar bill. These bills used to have two large roman numeral tens ("X") on their reverse side, resembling the scaffold for a sawbuck or sawhorse. From The Knickerbocker magazine of 1850:

Send me the two double “saw-bucks.”

Sawbuck is not known to be related to buck, meaning a dollar, but the possibility cannot be dismissed. They certainly influenced one another in any case.

(Source:Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition)