Séamus since then. Though still used by some as a derogatory term, the great preponderance of Irish and Irish-American law enforcement officers led to a persisting stereotype, and the name "Shamus" continues to refer to Irish-American police and private detectives. Séamus Variant spellings include ', ', ', ', "Shaymus", "Sheamus" and "Shamus". Diminutives include ', ' and "". In the United States, the word "Shamus" is a derogatory slang misspelling of Séamus that arose during the 19th century as more than 4.5 million Irish immigrated to America, peaking at almost two million between 1845 and 1852 during ""The Great Hunger"" (Irish:
Slang legal setting, as both are arenas in which standard language is considered necessary and/or whether the term has been entered in the Oxford English Dictionary, which some scholars claim changes its status as slang. It is often difficult to collect etymologies for slang terms, largely because slang is a phenomenon of speech, rather than written language and etymologies which are typically traced via corpus. Eric Partridge, cited as the first to report on the phenomenon of slang in a systematic and linguistic way, postulated that a term would likely be in circulation for a decade before it would be written