Green’s Dictionary of Slang

chaw n.

[? dial. chaw, chew, as in chewing tobacco or abbr. chaw-bacon n. (1)]

1. a yokel.

J.W. Kaye Peregrine Pulteney I 16: There are so many different dialects, what with ‘snobs,’ and ‘clods,’ and ‘chaws,’ and ‘jigs’.
[UK]R.S. Surtees Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour 6: The rustics [...] have the clownish look and boorish gait of the regular ‘chaws’.
[UK]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.
[UK]J.T. Keane On Blue-Water 213: His mildest words were, ‘You chaw! You thing! You dog!’.

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

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

3. a conversation.

[US]C.L. Cullen Tales of the Ex-Tanks 240: I remember getting into a good-natured chaw with some longshoremen.
[US]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.
[US]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.

[US]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.
in Calif. Folklore Quarterly I 228: The scabs come from Joplin, / And the ‘Chaws’ come down from Butte [HDAS].
[US]J. Callahan Man’s Grim Justice 16: He called another big, red-faced ‘chaw’ and told him to lock me up.
[US]‘Dean Stiff’ Milk and Honey Route 38: An Irishman is a ‘flannel mouth,’ ‘a chaw,’ or a ‘mick’.
[US]W.N. Burns One-Way Ride 78: An old chaw, puffing his dudeen by a barroom stove [...] might spin a yarn about him.
[US]A.J. Pollock Und. Speaks.
[US]Monteleone Criminal Sl. (rev. edn).

5. (US campus) a handsome man.

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

6. see chow n.1 (1)

7. see chow n.2 (1)