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Japanese hancho
- honcho (n.) 1947, American English, "officer in charge," from Japanese hancho "group leader," from han "corps, squad" + cho "head, chief."
www.etymonline.com/word/honcho
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Sep 28, 2017 · honcho. (n.) 1947, American English, "officer in charge," from Japanese hancho "group leader," from han "corps, squad" + cho "head, chief." Picked up by U.S. servicemen in Japan and Korea, 1947-1953. also from 1947.
The earliest known use of the noun honcho is in the 1940s. OED's earliest evidence for honcho is from 1945, in the Coshocton Tribune (Coshocton, Ohio). honcho is a borrowing from Japanese.
A relic of the large U.S. presence in Japan in the years following World War II, the word honcho comes from the Japanese word hanchō meaning “leader of the squad, section, group.”
Sep 6, 2024 · English. [edit] Etymology. [edit] From Japanese 班 はん 長 ちょう (hanchō, “squad leader”), from 19th c. Mandarin 班長 ／ 班长 (bānzhǎng, “team leader”). Probably entered English during World War II: many apocryphal stories describe American soldiers hearing Japanese prisoners-of-war refer to their lieutenants as hanchō. Pronunciation. [edit]
Oct 29, 2013 · The first published references to the word came in 1947, when New Zealand-born journalist James M. Bertram used it in his book The Shadow of a War: A New Zealander in the Far East, 1939-1946 ...
a person who is in charge of an organization, or in an important position in it: The head honchos at the studio refused to make his movie. He's the company's marketing honcho. (Definition of honcho from the Cambridge Business English Dictionary © Cambridge University Press)
Word Origin 1940s: from Japanese hanchō ‘group leader’, a term brought back to the US by servicemen stationed in Japan during the occupation following the Second World War.
