Etymology tree
English hunk
Proto-Indo-European *-kos
Proto-Germanic *-gaz
Proto-West Germanic *-g
Old English -iġ
Middle English -y
English -y
English hunky
From hunk + -y.
Meanings
(informal) Exhibiting strong, masculine beauty.
Shaped like a hunk, or piece; chunky.
(US, slang) All right; in good condition.
(US, slang) even; square; on equal footing with.
[…] he dropped like a brick into the firing line and began to shoot; began to get "hunky" with all those people who had been plugging at him. 1900, Stephen Crane, Wounds in the Rain:
From the older *hunk, probably alteration of Hungarian + -ie/-y. Compare bohunk and honky / honkey.
Meanings
(US, ethnic, slang, slur, uncommon) A Hungarian or other eastern European, e.g. a Romanian or a Slav. (Sometimes applied (like honky) to any white person.)
Like blacks, who were the only ethnic group below them on the social scale, Eastern Europeans, contemptuously labelled ‘hunkies’, were dismissed as incapable and untrustworthy. 2009, Victor Bockris, Warhol: The Biography, page 20:
He made hunkies and cut ice-cream sandwiches. 1940, Unemployment Compensation Interpretation Service: Benefit series, page 183:
On the negative side, a hunky was culturally schizophrenic, an inhabitant of crowded and ill-kept rooms and whose clothing was in poor taste, an alcoholic, intrinsically dull and stupid, an offspring of domineering parents, […] 1994, Josephine Wtulich, American Xenophobia and the Slav Immigrant: A Living Legacy of Mind and Spirit:
"All hunkies and wops, and no wonder there was seven hundred and fifty of them." 1924, Jack Bethea, Bed Rock, page 175:
He said, "I'm going to buy this building and turn this into a Nigger bar. I'm going to bar all you fucking hunkies." 1969, Robert Beck (Iceberg Slim), Trick Baby, page 149
The night before I had let a hunky called Big John have a dollar's worth of chips in the poker game […] 1952, Chester Himes, Cast the First Stone, page 66: