A: I was thinking about getting a butterfly tattoo about yea big on my ankle.
B: No.
Do you think “yea” here is a typo? Or it does have its meaning here?
It’s not a typo. In spoken English, we use “yea” accompanied by a hand gesture to describe the size of something.
From wiktionary:
"Adverb
yea
Thus, so (now often accompanied by a hand gesture)
The pony was yea high."
1 Like
It is so colloquial, and it’s so hard to make the accompanying hand gesture in writing, that I wasn’t aware that this word is spelled “yea”. I’ve spoken it but never written it. I would have spelled it “yay”.
2 Likes
Means ‘this’ and refers to size. Pronounced ‘yay’ or ‘yae’. ‘His coffin were yae [indicates size] big.’ - quote from Phoenix Nights.