A recent English Language & Usage question (Information about "lookit") noted that a number of dictionaries do not have entries for the word lookit. I checked Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Merriam-Webster's Eleventh Collegiate Dictionary,the fifth edition of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, The Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, A Dictionary of Americanisms on Historical Principles, the second edition of The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms, and The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (the one that comes with the magnifying glass—and couldn't find any coverage of the word.
I am curious about the origin, meaning, and syntactical application of this word, which leads me to ask the following questions:
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Where and when did lookit originate?
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Does lookit have more than one meaning?
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Is the form "lookit here" related to "looky here" and "look-a-here"?
I had done some research on these questions and wrote up an account of my findings, but originally I posted that account as an answer to the "Information about 'lookit'" question noted above, which is only tangentially related to the questions that interested me. So I am posting the questions that interested me here, and I have moved my answer to this page, where it belongs.
Best Answer
Historically, it seems that lookit has appeared in print in three distinct contexts: as a variant spelling of looked; as a variant spelling of "look at," and as an idiomatic form of the imperative "Look!" I found some early occurrences of each.
'Lookit' as 'looked'
The earliest instances of lookit that a Google Books search finds are as variants for the past-tense verb looked. Many of these print instances arise in Scottish writing. For example, from a song titled "Bothwell," in Ancient and Modern Scottish Songs, Heroic Ballads, Etc. (published in Edinburgh in 1776):
And from Robert Jamieson, Popular Ballads and Songs, From Tradition, Manuscripts, and Scarce Editions, volume 2 (published in Edinburgh in 1806) in three separate songs:
and
and
In these instances—and in quite a few others that appear throughout the nineteenth century—lookit is simply a variant of looked, presumably spelled as it is to represent the pronunciation of the word in contemporaneous Scots English.
'Lookit' as 'look at'
Another form of usage involves lookit appearing in the sense of "look at." Again, as was the case in instances where lookit stood in for looked," there is no syntactical difference between lookit and "look at"; the point of the spelling lookit seems simply to imitate the pronunciation of "look at" that the quoted speaker uses. This form begins showing up in Google Books matches in the 1920s. In their answers to the "Information about 'lookit'" question, both Michael Harvey and user067531 cite Theodore Dreiser's use of lookit in this sense in An American Tragedy (1925):
However, an Elephind newspaper database search finds instances of lookit in the sense of "look at" from at least as early as 1901. From "A Police Station Story," in the Colfax [Louisiana] Chronicle (January 5, 1901), reprinted from the Chicago [Illinois] Daily Record:
And from "The Sketcher: A Later Waterloo," in the [Ipswich] Queensland Times, Ipswich Herald and General Advertiser (December 3, 1901):
The policemen in this vignette are evidently Irish American.
And again (somewhat later) from Jim Manee, "It's a Great World After All Whether You're 'Going North, South or West'," in the [Chicago, Illinois] Day Book (June 15, 1915), an article about life aboard a jitney bus:
And from the title of a comic strip by Satterfield in the Tacoma [Washington] Times (July 3, 1915):
'Lookit' as 'Look!'
Something fundamentally different in terms of syntax seems to be going on in Frank Clifford, A Romance of Perfume Lands, Search for Capt. Jacob Cole (Boston, 1875):
Patsey is a 25-year-old Irish immigrant to the United States who has inadvertently joined an expedition to the Far East by stowing away on a ship in hopes of returning to Ireland. He uses lookit not as a variant form of looked or "look at" but in the imperative sense of "look at it!" or simply "look!"
The association of the expression with an Irish speaker isn't exclusive to Frank Clifford. From Foster Osborne, Cowabee, serialized in the [Sydney, New South Wales] Australian Town and Country Journal (May 13, 1882):
From an untitled brief item in the [Brisbane] Queensland Figaro and Punch (January 30, 1886):
From "A New Experience," in the Albion [Illinois] Journal (August 23, 1888):
The earliest non-Irish instance of lookit as a standalone imperative that I've been able to find is from Norman Duncan, "The Chase of the Tide," in the St. Paul [Minnesota] Globe (June 26, 1904):
Jo is a ten-year-old Newfoundland boy, and Ezekiel is his somewhat younger friend. Neither is identified in any way as being of Irish heritage, and both speak a dialect that is evidently peculiar to native Newfoundlanders.
And from Zona Gale, "Daffodils," in the Salt Lake [City] Tribune (March 24, 1907):
Paul is a seven-year-old boy from a well-to-do family who is visiting New York City with his grandfather from somewhere a fairly short train ride away.
By the 1920s, however, neither the Irish connection nor the link to children is prevalent in Google Books matches for lookit in the sense of "Look!" From Caroline Franklin, "A Dark Laid Plot," in Overland Monthly and the Out West Magazine (1924):
From Cyril Hume, The Golden Dancer (1926) (three of fourteen instances in the book):
and
and
And from an unidentified short story in O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories (1926):
'Lookit here' as a possible source of the standalone imperative 'Lookit!'
The 1926 instance of "lookit here" prompted me to check into the possibility that Lookit" in the sense of "Look!" might have originated as a shortened form of the longer phrase "lookit here." The earliest instance of lookit here that an Elephind search finds is rendered in a quasi-African American dialect. From Fannie Bolton, "Tend Your Own Patch," in the [Minnesota] Mower County Transcript (April 9, 1884):
It turns up again in "Beginning a Long Fast," in the [New York] Evening World (February 25, 1889):
From "Not His Fault," in the [Leadville, Colorado] Herald Democrat (April 22, 1894), an anecdote involving "Jimmy Knockerout, de pugilist":
And from "Stray Bubbles," in the [Echuca, Victoria] Riverine Herald (August 29, 1892):
It seems possible that the expression "lookit here" may be a variant of "looky here" or "look-a-here," both of which seem to be older than "lookit here" and may be contracted forms of "look ye [or you] here." An anecdote in the Holly Springs [Mississippi] Gazette (August 5, 1842) has a (presumably white) woman who runs an inn in the Sandy River region of Virginia say this:
And Harry Halyard, The Heroine of Paris, Or, The Novice of Notre Dame (1848) has an American character use the phrase "look a here":
Conclusions
The earliest print matches for lookit that I found were instances where the word was used as a variant for looked in Scots English dialect. I found Google Books matches going back to 1776, but a match that a search on Early English Books Online found suggests that the form is much older than that. From the 1571 George Buchanan translation out of the Latin of Ane detectioun of the duinges of Marie Quene of Scottes thouchand the murder of hir husband, and hir conspiracie, adulterie, and pretensed mariage with the Erle Bothwell. And ane defence of the trew Lordis, mainteineris of the Kingis graces actioun and authoritie.:
The earliest matches I could find for lookit in the sense of "look at" were from 1901—one in Illinois in January of that year and one in Queensland in December. In both of those cases, and indeed generally, the spelling seems to have been chosen to indicate the speaker's pronunciation of "look at," not to introduce a word with a different syntactical function from the phrase "look at."
Instances of lookit used in the sense of the imperative "Look!" go back to 1875 in the sources I checked. The earliest four matches (from 1875, 1882, 1886, and 1888) all involve Irish speakers, strongly indicating that some writers in the period 1875–1888 viewed the form as a peculiarity of Irish English dialect. In 1904 and 1907 writers put the expression in the mouths of non-Irish children—one from a Newfoundland village and one from an affluent town in the northeastern United States. By the 1920s, writers were freely attributing the expression to non-Irish adults.
I tried to investigate the possibility that lookit in the sense of "Look!" arose from the longer phrase "lookit here," which may in turn have arisen from a cluster of variants including "looky here" and "look-a-here." Unfortunately, I didn't find anything conclusive. The earliest match for "lookit here" that I could find was from 1884, nine years after the earliest instance of lookit in the sense of "Look!"; on the other hand, instances of "looky here" (1842) and "look a here" (1848) are considerably older than that 1875 instance of lookit.
I suspect that "looky here" and "look-a-here" are in large part responsible for the emergence of the expression "lookit here" by 1894. Nevertheless, the concentrated attribution of the earliest matches of standalone "lookit" in the sense of "Look!" to Irish speakers suggests to me that it was originally understood to be an Irish form, independent of "looky here" and "look-a-here." Intensive research into Irish publications from the period 1840–1880 might corroborate or seriously weaken this hypothesis.