Green’s Dictionary of Slang

polone n.

also paloma, palone, paloney, polony
[Ital. pollone, chick; however, note Polari etymologist WS Wilcox in a letter 25/11/99: ‘On the origins of polone I venture to suggest an alternative to previous ideas : Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (1861–2), gives the cant term hay-bag (a hay or straw mattress) for woman, very insulting, but paglione is an almost exact Italian translation of this. One of the possible suggested sources, pollone – plant-shoot, I feel unlikely, since in Italy it also has the slang meaning of penis’]
(Ling. Fr./Polari)

1. a young woman.

[Aus]Bulletin (Sydney) 18 Apr. 18/3: ‘Thou shall not suffer a witch to live,’ is an order of the old books which was obeyed with the most cheerful alacrity up to the last century; when, from the year 1484, the number of artists in the black art grilled, and otherwise disposed of in the land of ‘paloneys’ alone, dotted up to something considerably over 100,000.
[UK]C. Osborne [perf. T.E. Dunville] ‘Getting to the bottom of it’ 🎵 A big fat man at the dust-yard gate / Is cuddling your polony.
[Aus]Bulletin (Sydney) 8 Aug. Red Page/4: Dinnyhayeser set lurk, lumping polony Kingpin’s straight monniker, chatting dead sudden stink Fogwards by long punt.
[UK]T.E. Dunville [perf.] ‘And the Verdict Was’ 🎵 And the verdict was, / A little boat - two polonies - caught a crab - Davy Jones.
[UK]P. Allingham Cheapjack 202: I’d rather ’andle a man any day than a lot of these silly palones.
[UK]G. Greene Brighton Rock (1943) 24: What about that polony he was with?
[US] in W.C. Fields By Himself (1974) 336: There’s a tough paloma comes in by the name of Chicago Molly.
[UK]J. Maclaren-Ross ‘The Dark Diceman’ in Bitten by the Tarantula (2005) 203: Judies, dolls, palones, whatever you care to call ’em.
[UK]F. Norman in Encounter n.d. in Norman’s London (1969) 64: Get you, darling, all done up in drag, anyone would think you were a palone.
[UK]R. Hauser Homosexual Society Appendix 3 167: Polone, woman.
[UK]Took & Feldman ‘Bona Bijou Tourettes’ Round the Horne 30 Apr. [BBC radio] Divine. Sitting, sipping a tiny drinkette, vada·ing the great butch omis and dolly little palones trolling by.
[US]B. Rodgers Queens’ Vernacular.
[US]Maledicta VI:1+2 (Summer/Winter) 139: Parlyaree in homosexual use […] gives us nanti (no), bona[r] (good), [h]omi[e] (man), and polone (woman) and other mangled foreign words (cartso = penis, from Italian cazzo, etc.).
[US]M. Coward in Verbatim 24:2 n.p.: An omi is a man, a palone is a woman, and an omipalone is therefore self-explanatory.
[UK]P. Baker Fabulosa 296/1: palone, polone, polony, pollone, paloney, polonee palogne a woman or girl .
[UK]R. Milward Man-Eating Typewriter 76: I hadn’t set opals on palones such as this [...] in all my petty lavvy.

2. an effeminate man.

[US]‘Jennifer Blowdryer’ Modern English 6: bona palome (n): A gay Cockney word for hunk.
[UK]P. Baker Fantabulosa.