Pronounced sa-vE this word wears many hats but usually functions as a verb. The inflected form are savvied; and savvying . Shrewdness or know-how, other words and phrases that generate the same idea are knowledgeable, wise, with content, savoir-faire, canny, or clever knowledge that implies taste. Savvy people are shrewd and well informed.
Most likely this slang word from Spanish came into English from the Spanish saber, "to know" perhaps because it frequently appeared in stories of the West in the form ¡No sabe!, which sounds like ‘no savvy’ to the monolingual English-speaker. Saber came from the Latin word sapere, to be wise.
"He combines down-home sharpness with boardroom savvy." Today it seems to be a favorite word bandied about in business boardrooms or to be ‘tech savvy’ and ‘net savvy’ have been extended into the technological age.
Shrewder than know-how and broader than smarts, this noun, verb and adjective can be utilized in a variety of ways by knowing not just intellectually what’s right, but emotionally what’s right.
Savvy first appeared in print the late eighteenth century around 1785 in the West Indies as pidgin borrowed from the French savez(-vous)? Bret Harte,the popular writer of "The Luck of Roaring Camp" and several other California tales authored in the 1870s put the spelling with a "v" in the limelight. He might have heard it from Anglo buckaroos who commanded a working conversational ability in Spanish and their compatriots, the Vaqueros. By 1905 the adjective from the noun gained popular usage.
Sources:
etymology:
www.geocities.com/etymonline/s2etym.htm -
Word Improvisation - 00.03:
www.theatlantic.com/issues/2000/03/wordimprov.htm