Chunche
Thing, whatsit, doodah — and in the plural, all your stuff.
Related lesson: Costa Rican Spanish: A Survival Guide.
Hear it in context
Pasame ese chunche que está detrás de la puerta.
Pass me that thingy behind the door.
Tengo que sacar todos mis chunches del carro.
I need to get all my stuff out of the car.
¿Y este chunche para qué sirve?
And what's this contraption for?
What It Actually Means
Chunche is the word that stands in for any object at all: the gadget, the widget, the thing on the shelf, the part you cannot name. It is masculine, fully countable, and in the plural it shifts sense to mean possessions in bulk — recoja sus chunches is “get your stuff together”, said to someone who has left too much of it lying around.
Where It Comes From
Unsettled. It is Central American rather than exclusively tico, shared with Nicaragua, Honduras and Guatemala, and it is usually assumed to come from an indigenous source — Nahuatl and the Chibchan languages of the region both get named — without anyone producing a convincing donor word. Several dictionaries take the honest route and mark it “origin uncertain”, which is where this entry leaves it too.
How Natives Use It
Freely, in every register short of the written and formal, and with no embarrassment: reaching for chunche is not an admission of poor vocabulary, it is just faster. Colombia and Venezuela do the same work with vaina, though vaina also covers situations and problems, where chunche stays firmly physical.
Common Pitfall
Keep it on objects. Applied to a person — ese chunche — it is straightforwardly insulting, in the way that calling someone “that thing” would be in English. And because it is so easy, learners lean on it: if you know the word for the object, use the word, or you will spend a year in Costa Rica without acquiring the noun for “screwdriver”.