The Disappearing Dictionary: A Treasury of Lost English Dialect Words by David Crystal

Author:David Crystal [Crystal, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Humor, General, Language Arts & Disciplines, Linguistics, Morphology, Spelling & Vocabulary, Syntax
ISBN: 9781447282792
Google: Jp6WBQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Published: 2015-05-21T20:42:32+00:00

N

nang or gnang (verb)

Cumberland, Dorset, Kent, Somerset, Sussex, Westmorland, Yorkshire

Of a pain: to keep up a dull, continuous aching. From Yorkshire: ‘This old tooith is gnangin’ at it agean’. It could also mean ‘complain, worry’, like the crying of a fretful child or the continual grumbling of an ill-tempered adult. From Kent: ‘He keeps on nanging at me’. The origin is obscure: it may simply be a variant of nag, with the sound of the ng adding an element of persistence.

nazzard (noun)

Cumberland, Lancashire, Westmorland, Yorkshire

A silly, insignificant, mean person. As with other nouns beginning with n- or a- (see amplush, attercop) people often couldn’t decide where to draw the line between the indefinite article and the noun: is it a nazzard or an azzard? The original form seems to be nazzard, as in this Westmorland example: ‘Didta ivver see sic a wurm itten nazzard i’ thi life?’ The origin is obscure. There may be a link with French nez, ‘nose’ – perhaps recalling a contemptuous gesture made by flicking or waggling the fingers against the nose (as is still done today).

nesh (adjective)

Cheshire, Cornwall, Cumberland, Derbyshire, Devon, Dorset, Gloucestershire, Hampshire, Herefordshire, Lancashire, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire, Northumberland, Nottinghamshire, Scotland, Shropshire, Somerset, Staffordshire, Wales, Warwickshire, Westmorland, Wiltshire, Worcestershire, Yorkshire

Soft to the touch; delicate in health; brittle, crumbly; damp [weather]; dainty, timid. The Old English word for ‘soft’, hnesce, developed a wide range of senses throughout Britain, and entered American dialects too. From Somerset, about beans: ‘They’re too nesh to gather yet awhile’. From Herefordshire: ‘The sheep be doing fairish, but some of the lambs be very nesh this time’. If you were nesh-stomached, you had a very delicate appetite. And if you had a timid-looking face, you were nesh-phizzed.

nickerers (noun)

Scotland

New shoes that make a creaking noise. The root of the word is nick, in its sense of ‘make a clicking sound’. In Scotland and the North of England, nick-nack was an alternative name for the tick-tock of a clock. In Cornwall, if you had nickety-knock you were having palpitations. The etymology isn’t known. There could be a connection with horses: nicker was used throughout the British Isles to mean ‘neigh’, and the place in the mouth where the gh sound in neigh was made in Old English is the same as where a k sound was made.

niff (noun)

Cornwall, Devon, Gloucestershire, Shropshire, Somerset, Surrey, Sussex

A silent, sullen feeling of resentment; a quarrel. From Somerset: ‘Let her alone, her’ve o’ny a-got a bit of a niff, her’ll zoon come o’ that again’. Someone offended would be niffed or niffy. The source isn’t clear. It might have been a variant of sniff. In Sussex niff was used to describe a sniff or smell. It might also have been a variant of miff, ‘huff’.

noggle (verb)

Cornwall, Hampshire, Shropshire, Wales, Yorkshire

To manage anything with difficulty; especially, to walk with difficulty because weak or heavily laden. From Pembrokeshire: ‘I was main weak, I could hardly walk, but I noggled it somehow’. The speaker was thus feeling noggly. The word was

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