Everyone knows what the word “kike” means, but not everyone agrees on where the word comes from. That mystery is back in the headlines with yet another viral use of the slur this time, it was NBA player Meyers Leonard who unleashed the word during a heated gaming moment.
“Dictionaries prefer to say that its origin is unknown, which is right but uninspiring,” Anatoly Liberman wrote on the Oxford English Dictionary blog in 2009, as part of a series he did on ethnic slurs.
And to make matters more complex, the OED was unable to officially identify any uses of “kike” before 1904. That means we move to the world of theories.