However, 'chap' here is informal, just a less highbrow/remote replacement for 'person', and (from the context, which hints at say a Bertie-Wooster-like association) having a (dated) British upper-class connection.
chap — " (British) fellow. Origin of chap: chapman" lad — "a male person of any age between early boyhood and maturity" So, it seems, that lad can be related only to a young person. While chap and bloke to any male person. My British fellow said: Chap is more delicate; bloke is rougher a bit. Chap is posh, bloke is common.
No. The standard abbreviations are Ch. and Chap. …or at least, if there is such a symbol, Unicode doesn’t know about it yet — and Unicode is pretty comprehensive, including characters as diverse as the inverted interrobang ⸘, biohazard sign ☣, and snowman ☃, not to mention the Shavian alphabet and much, much, much more.
Is there a standard symbol for denoting a chapter in a citation?
(Source: Can a woman be a chap?, Patricia T. O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman, Grammarphobia, 15 May 2019) Increasingly there is criticism of using potentially gendered terms such as "guys"; you can argue if they are gendered, but there is still the risk of excluding women or upsetting people.
Poor chap vs. poor woman [closed] Ask Question Asked 10 years, 6 months ago Modified 10 years, 6 months ago
vocabulary - Poor chap vs. poor woman - English Language & Usage Stack ...
1993 A. Habens in M. Bradbury & A. Motion New Writing 2 247 It's a rum do if a chap isn't allowed to remember what he remembers. The adjective rum gives rise to may composites e.g. rum-looking, rum-sounding etc