देखो

Dekko comes from Hindi dekho (देखो), the informal imperative form of dekhna (देखना), 'to see, to look' — from Sanskrit dṛś (to see), which is also the root of darśana (a vision, an auspicious sight), Sanskrit's great philosophical concept of seeing and being seen. In Hindi, dekho is the command addressed familiarly: look! have a look at this! The imperative register — direct, energetic, slightly peremptory — is what made it attractive to British soldiers, who borrowed the command and turned it into a noun: 'have a dekko' meaning 'take a look.' The transformation from imperative verb to English noun is a neat compression: the Hindi command for an action became the English name for that action.

British soldiers serving in India from the eighteenth century onwards were immersed in Hindi — and specifically in the Hindustani that served as a military lingua franca across the subcontinent. Regimental glossaries and soldiers' memoirs from the early nineteenth century record a substantial body of Hindi vocabulary that had entered barracks English: dekko, char (tea), dhobi (washerman), pukka, jaldi (quickly). These words reflected the practical daily life of soldiers stationed in India: communicating with servants, ordering food, navigating bazaars. Dekko was part of a cluster of words for sensory actions — looking, listening, going, hurrying — that soldiers needed and borrowed.

The word was carried back to Britain by returning soldiers and spread into civilian English through the channels that military slang typically uses: the memoirs and popular journalism of retired officers, the conversations of men who had served abroad, and eventually the common stock of informal British English that derives so much of its colour from military usage. By the early twentieth century, dekko was established in British slang dictionaries and in popular fiction. P.G. Wodehouse used it; it appeared in war-era journalism; it was recognisable enough to function as slang without explanation.

In contemporary British English, dekko is marked as informal and slightly dated — a word that speakers associate with a certain generation, a certain register, a certain flavour of uncomplicated directness. 'Let's have a dekko' is neither formal nor archaic, but it carries a slight period quality, evoking military memoirs and postwar fiction. The Hindi imperative has been naturalised so thoroughly that it no longer sounds foreign, only old-fashioned. The Sanskrit root dṛś — to see — which gave Sanskrit its vocabulary of vision and divine sight, has ended its long journey in the British idiom for a casual glance.