Green’s Dictionary of Slang

by-blow n.

a bastard.

1594		R. Barnfield Hellen’s Rape 3: In such a Ladies lappe, at such a slipperie by-blow, / That in a world so wide could not be found such a wilie Lad.
1607		Middleton Michaelmas Term IV i: (Aside) A by-blow for me.
1611		Middleton & Dekker Roaring Girle I i: My father fetches his by-blows to hit me!
1624		Massinger Parliament of Love II i: Give to each by-blow, I know mine, a farm.
1632		T. Randolph Jealous Lovers I iii: Take Evadne / Your pretty-precious-by-blow-fair Evadne.
1647		J. Cleveland Poem in Character of a London-Diurnall 49: This last Legitimateth all her by blowes past.
1660		Wandring Whore I 3: That what bastards and By-blows fall out amongst us, may be preserved for fear of Bridewell, New-prison, or Tyburn.
1660		‘Megg. Spencer’ A Strange and True Conference 8: Andrew Good who has 2 or 3 Bye Blows at Nurse.
1678		Four for a Penny 7: He is one of Deucalion’s By-blows, begotten of a Stone.
1683		R. Dixon Canidia i 34: If a By-blow comes, she is to hide it, / The dam must marry, simper, Bride it; / Put the Bastard out to Nurse, / Or strangle it, ’tis none the worse.
1696		Motteux (trans.) Gargantua and Pantagruel (1927) II Bk V 554: In imitation of that noble by-blow, let us destroy and root out these wicked furred law-cats.
1704		Gentleman Instructed 165: An Atheist [...] is a Byblow begot by Hazard, and flung into the World by necessity.
1721		Penkethman’s Jests 15: A Captain of a French Privateer who had been a Prisoner at Dover [...] staid long enough there to have an English Mistress, by whom he had a little By-blow.
1749		Fielding Tom Jones (1959) 251: Many of these bye-blows come to be great men.
1765		Foote The Commissary 45: I will return her bye-blow in the body of a double base-viol.
1771		Smollett Humphrey Clinker (1925) II 213: Mr. Clinker is found to be a pye-blow [sic] of our own squire, and his right name is Mr. Matthew Loyd.
1786		C. Morris ‘Jenny Sutton’ Collection of Songs (1788) 52: A bye-blow on the world she burst, / By furious love engender’d.
1796		Grose Classical Dict. of the Vulgar Tongue n.p.: bye blow, a bastard.
1811		Lex. Balatronicum.
1821		‘A Real Paddy’ Real Life in Ireland 250: Jenny has put the first bye blow out to nurse, and expects to be married to a sailor.
1823		Proceedings of Jockey and Maggy 5: We may do it ay; what an we get a bystart, an’ hae to suffer for the foul act of fornication.
1842		Egan ‘The By-Blow of the Jug’ in Farmer Musa Pedestris (1896) 144: His mammy his father did not know, / But that’s no odds – Jack was a by-blow!
1850		(con. 1843) Melville White-Jacket (1990) 13: Jack must have been a by-blow of some British Admiral of the Blue.
1859		H. Kingsley Recollections of G. Hamlyn (1891) 311: He had some byeblows in Devon, by all accounts. If this is one of them, how the deuce did he get here?
1863		G.A. Sala Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous 177: As for Grandchildren of the byblows of King Charles II, good lack! to hear them talk of the ‘Merry Monarch’.
1875		‘Ouida’ Signa I 34: The one who held the child turned his light on the little wet face; [...] ‘And whose by-blow is this?’ said he.
1887		H. Caine Deemster I 48: ‘To the father of the girl’s by-blow,’ he shouted.
1895		Crowe Aus. Sl. Dict. 13: Byblow, an illegitimate child.
1909		J. Ware Passing Eng. of the Victorian Era.
1936		(con. 1830s–60s) ‘Miles Franklin’ All That Swagger 143: And ye to be tigrinizing about after Hennessy’s by-blow – no father and mother!
1938		S. Beckett Murphy (1963) 115: An elder sister, two nieces and a by-blow on the female side.
1945		D. Bolster Roll On My Twelve 38: [Ch. title] Bye-Blow.
1951		S.H. Bell December Bride 177: You’re a wee by-blow, son, ye don’t know who your da is.
1986		J.B. Keane Bodhrán Makers 163: The scoundrel has a wife and nine children by his marriage and heaven only knows how many by-blows scattered all over the countryside.
2002		‘Barbara Vine’ Blood Doctor (2003) 145: It was very marked in the eighteen eighties. And the divide between the children one’s wife had and the by-blows or wrong side of the blanket children was very wide.
2012		(con. 1943) G.S. Manson Coorparoo Blues [ebook] [A] lime-filled mass grave of clerical by-blows was to be found behind the walls of a New Farm nunnery.
2024		J. Meades Empty Wigs (t/s) 199: Regimental tales of his by-blows were rife. [...] [He] left a proud trail of straw-haired, congenitally syphilitic, flat-nosed piccaninnies.