Green’s Dictionary of Slang

1. a yokel.

1844		J.W. Kaye Peregrine Pulteney I 16: There are so many different dialects, what with ‘snobs,’ and ‘clods,’ and ‘chaws,’ and ‘jigs’.
1853		R.S. Surtees Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour 6: The rustics [...] have the clownish look and boorish gait of the regular ‘chaws’.
1857		T. Hughes Tom Brown’s School-Days 18: There’s nothing like the old country-side for me, and no music like the twang of the real old Saxon tongue, as one gets it fresh from the veritable chaw in the White Horse Vale.
1883		J.T. Keane On Blue-Water 213: His mildest words were, ‘You chaw! You thing! You dog!’.

2. (US campus) a trick, a prank.

1856

B.H. Hall College Words (rev. edn) 63: chaw. A deception or trick.

3. a conversation.

1899–1900		C.L. Cullen Tales of the Ex-Tanks 240: I remember getting into a good-natured chaw with some longshoremen.
1902		C.L. Cullen More Ex-Tank Tales 88: The end of the chaw was that the old man promised to meet O’Brien in Buffalo.
1929		E. Dahlberg Bottom Dogs 264: Red Rufus, who had dropped out of the klondike three and a half berries in the hole and wasn’t much on listening to David’s chaw.

4. (US) an Irish immigrant.

1904		C. Connors Bowery Life [ebook] Say, don’t you know what a chaw is? He’s a mug wid a sponge in his mout’ you know; a flannel-mout’ bloke.
c.1916		in Calif. Folklore Quarterly I 228: The scabs come from Joplin, / And the ‘Chaws’ come down from Butte [HDAS].
1928		J. Callahan Man’s Grim Justice 16: He called another big, red-faced ‘chaw’ and told him to lock me up.
1930		‘Dean Stiff’ Milk and Honey Route 38: An Irishman is a ‘flannel mouth,’ ‘a chaw,’ or a ‘mick’.
1931		W.N. Burns One-Way Ride 78: An old chaw, puffing his dudeen by a barroom stove [...] might spin a yarn about him.
1935		A.J. Pollock Und. Speaks.
1949		Monteleone Criminal Sl. (rev. edn).

5. (US campus) a handsome man.

1977

Eble Campus Sl. Fall 2: chaw – a good-looking male.

6. see chow n.¹ (1)

7. see chow n.² (1)