What it means
Old-school British slang for an attractive person, usually a woman. It sits in that laddish, slightly grubby banter lane, so said straight it can sound sleazy or a bit objectifying. Now you mostly hear it with a wink, when someone’s half quoting older pub-bloke chat rather than genuinely trying to pull.
Usage examples
"Dave spotted some totty near the bar and started smoothing his shirt. I said, calm down, mate, you’ve got crisps in your beard."
"My nan still calls the men reading the news a bit of totty, my granddad rolls his eyes from behind his crossword and pretends he is not also pleased by the compliment."
"The wedding was advertised as a chance to meet some serious totty, in the end the entire dance floor was relatives over sixty doing the conga to Westlife badly."
"He kept calling the presenter a bit of totty and the whole sofa gave him that mate, pack it in look."
"You only hear totty now when someone’s doing a full pub-bore impression or taking the piss out of one."
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Where it comes from
Probably from totty as a nineteenth-century pet form of children words, drifting later into Edwardian Cockney slang for a young woman. By the seventies it had filled the lecherous corner of British sitcom dialogue, and now lives mostly in self-aware quotation marks, a wink at the language of the bad old days down the local boozer.
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