shebang
Part of speech: noun
Morphological type: simple
Etymology: Unknown. First attested in 1854 in Pennsylvania as "chebang" in the sense of an Oddfellows lodge. Attested from the early 1860s with the meaning "inn" and (slightly later) “temporary shelter”. The earliest attestions (1854-1859) are spelled "chebang" and abstractly seem to indicate an "affair," "matter of concern," or "happening," in keeping with the modern sense, and seem to be from Midwestern sources; the specific sense of a structure, often pejorative and usually spelled "shebang," seems to originate in the American West just before the Civil War and was widely diffused by troops during the conflict; the sense of a "vehicle” is from 1871–2. The first two senses seem to have been conflated extensively, though they may have different origins. A note by Massachusetts journalist Samuel Bowles dated June 5th, 1865 refers to the term as "vernacular of the [Rocky] Mountains" (Colorado), and defines shebang as "any kind of an establishment, store, house, shop, shanty." This sense appears in California as early as 1860, "the old shebang of a theatre." This apparently Western sense is almost certainly from shebeen, sheban (“cabin where unlicensed liquor is sold and drunk (chiefly in Ireland and Scotland)”), from Irish síbín (“illicit whiskey”), diminutive of síob (“a drift”). One of the earliest known quotations, from June 1862 in the Washington Territory, specifically denotes an inn being used as a front for illegal liquor sales. Irish actor and novelist Tyrone Power used "sheban" in the sense of an inn in his 1830 novel The Lost Heir.
In the sense of “temporary shelter”, it was perhaps spread by US Civil War Confederate enlistees from Louisiana, from French chabane (“hut, cabin”), a dialectal form of French cabane (“a covered hut, lodge, cabin”) (see cabin, cabana), or at least influenced by this term. (However, it was not, as sometimes claimed, common among prisoners at Andersonville; the US National Park Service says it "is virtually absent from most prisoner diaries and contemporary memoirs" and testimony.) The vehicle sense is perhaps from the unrelated French char-à-banc (“bus-like wagon with many seats”). The sense of “matter of concern” could be from either, or sound-symbolic/onomatopoeic.
Inflected forms:
form: shebangs
pos: noun
tags: plural
form: chebang
pos: noun
tags: alternative
form: schebang
pos: noun
tags: alternative
form: sheebang
pos: noun
tags: alternative
Senses:
gloss: A lean-to or temporary shelter.
pos: noun
tags: US
dated
informal
examples: Their shebang enclosures of bushes.
They say that old pirate, Kingfisher Culpepper, had a stock of the real thing from Robertson County laid in his shebang on the Marsh just before he died.
gloss: A place or building; a store, saloon, or brothel.
pos: noun
tags: US
dated
informal
examples: Along all the roads on the reservation to all the mines, at the crossing of every stream or fresh-water spring, and near the principal Indian villages, an inn or shebang is established, ostensibly for the entertainment of travellers, but almost universally used as a den for supplying liquor to Indians."
gloss: Any matter of present concern; thing; or business; most commonly in the phrase the whole shebang.
pos: noun
tags: informal
examples: On the third the whole "chebang" was removed [...]
I like the book, I like you and your style and your business vim, and believe the chebang will be a success.
"Before I'd share anything with you," he said bitterly, "I’d lose the whole shebang."
gloss: A vehicle.
pos: noun
tags: informal
obsolete
examples: […] So they got into the empty omnibus and sat down. Colonel Jack says: “...What is the name of this.” Colonel Jim told him it was a barouche. After a while he poked his head out in front and said to the driver, “I say, Johnny, this suits me. We want this shebang all day. Let the horses go.”
Derived words: whole shebang
Translations: