Here at WoWasis, we’re fond of using the word punter to describe men that favor the company of female entertainment providers. Those women could be dancers, freelancers on the street, gals working in beer gardens, or massage parlors. They all share one thing in common, their jobs entail meeting men for temporary or permanent financial gain.

We first saw the word used in the newspaper columns of Bernard Trink, whose ‘Nite Owl’ column last graced the pages of the Bangkok Post several years ago. Trink, however, had been writing newspaper columns since 1965, where his column debuted in the newspaper Bangkok World. Some veteran punters today, however, don’t use the word, or even know what it means. That sent us scrambling to the venerable OED, the Oxford English Dictionary, which not only lists definitions, but indicates where the word was first used in print, as far as the OED can determine.

The OED informs us that the word punter has 5 meanings, included one who bets at racetracks, and one who kicks footballs. Definition #5 is the one that concerns us:  “A customer or client; a member of an audience or spectator; specifically, the client of a prostitute.” The OED cites its first use in the Sunday Times,  March 15, 1960:  “I always make the punter wear a rubber.”

The word is used by farang all over Thailand, and we’ve used it ourselves in adjective form, particularly when describing the “punterly” clothing habits of some foreigners, the best example of which was an overweight foreigner wearing a tank top, shorts, Playboy bunny socks, and sandals, that we once saw walking down Sukhumvit.  The word is a valuable one, but we have a feeling that it was used prior to 1970. Are any of our readers aware of its use in this sense, in print, prior to then?