イケメン translation to English

Question

I am in a Japanese 101 class. We are suppose to translate the following sentance:

日本ぶんかの先生は、イケメンですが、ぜんぜんやさしくないですから、あまり好きじゃありません。

I am having trouble with that katakana イケメン. So far, I have:

The Japanese culture professor is ? but he/she is not lenient at all so I don't like
him/her very much

I am pretty sure we haven't had イケメン in class. And trying to pronouce "ikemen" doesn't sound like an English borrowed word (at least to me).

Google translates it as "Twink" and I have found some places that say handsome, cool, etc. But I don't know what to trust. Can anyone explain to me the meaning(s) of the word?

Answer 1

イケメン is a new word which means "Good looking male person".

イケ comes from イケてる which roughly translates to "cool", "good" etc. メン is a word play, and has two meanings; メン as in "men" i.e. the English word for men, and メン as in 面（めん） i.e. the Japanese word for "face".

It is used exclusively to refer to the physical attractiveness of males.

Answer 2

It's not a loan word, it means "good looking". This illustrates a common problem with basic Japanese teaching, they tell you that words written in katakana are loanwords, but don't go into all the other uses of katakana (though loanwords is the most common and 7 times out of 10 that is the case).

Specifically in this case, certain colloquial words whose kanji is sufficiently outdated use katakana.

Answer 3

As the others have said, イケメン is basically a word that describes a male as being attractive/good-looking. Don't use this for females.

As sort of a supplement, I've also seen the word イケてる been used, which can function as a verb too. This was in a book though, I've never heard a native Japanese use this in normal conversation, but it may help you get a feel for the usage of イケ.

このプロット結構イケてると思う。
I think this plot is quite 'cool'.

EDIT

Ah, hadn't seen Enno's anwer describing イケてる yet. Guess you got the question covered now ;)