What it means
Used when it’s properly cold, that sharp nip that creeps up your sleeves and has you whingeing within five minutes. Not quite full-on baltic, but still enough to make you dig out gloves and question your life choices. Handy little word for weather that’s rude rather than deadly. Proper for a moan on the school run or outside the chippy.
Usage examples
"Ey up, it’s parky this morn. Nipped to corner shop in a hoodie and me hands went numb. Get tha coat on before t’bus comes."
"Ey up, it's parky this morning in the back garden of the terraced house on Burley Road in Leeds, nipped to the corner shop on Cardigan Lane in just a hoodie and a thin scarf and my hands went numb by the third house down, get tha proper coat on before the school bus comes round the bend at twenty past eight."
"The morning of the Christmas market in York last December was proper parky from the first stall on Parliament Street, the mulled wine seller at the booth by the Minster was selling three cups for the price of two before nine, my mother kept her wool hat on inside the Tea Room of Bettys, and the windows of the café fogged up beautifully against the cold."
Where it comes from
From the older British dialect adjective parky (cold, frosty), of uncertain origin but probably linked to the obsolete English park in the sense of a stretch of bare ground exposed to the elements, attested in northern English speech since the mid-nineteenth century. The word crystallized in twentieth-century British colloquial usage as the mild-mannered alternative to the blunter freezing or baltic, and survives intact in the daily weather report at the corner shop of every Yorkshire mining town and every Lancashire mill village from October through to early April.
Other ways to say it
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