fainty (adjective)
Cheshire, Devon, Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Oxfordshire, Scotland, Warwickshire, Worcestershire, Yorkshire
Of the weather: close, sultry, oppressive. From Devon: ‘the weather is cruel fainty today’. This is evidently weather that is so sultry it makes you feel faint, and indeed, fainty was also widely used throughout the country to mean ‘faint, weak’. Its earliest recorded use is actually by Bible translator William Tyndale, who talks of faith being ‘feble and fayntye’, and later literary users include Dryden and Coleridge. But the extension to the weather seems dialectal.
fandandering (adjective)
Northumberland
Idle, good-for-nothing. ‘A fandanderin’ body – nowther gentry nor common fowk – never did a hand’s turn that I mind, and never did ill owther’. An Irish variant was fandangling. The etymology isn’t clear, but it probably relates to fandangle, ‘fantastic ornaments’, which also developed the sense of ‘nonsense’, and that in turn may have come from the dance fandango, which became very popular in the eighteenth century.
fanty-sheeny (adjective)
Devon
Showy, fanciful, over-particular. ‘Dawntee let me zee no more ov yer fanty-sheeny ways’. The source is Italian fantoccini, describing puppets that moved using concealed strings. Fantoccini shows were popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and are mentioned by Boswell, Hazlitt, Dickens, and others. Several toured throughout the West Country, so the extended sense may well have been known in Cornwall and Somerset too.
fawnicate (verb)
Kent, Sussex
To fondle affectionately. From Kent, a mother to her child when cuddling up to her: ‘Bless you, you little fawnicating thing’. The source is fawn, ‘showing fondness’, as in standard English, but the verb with the -icate ending never became standard – presumably because it would have sounded too much like fornicate in upper-class pronunciation, where the r wasn’t pronounced after a vowel. Dialects would have kept the r and avoided any confusion.
feelth (noun)
Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, Rutland, Warwickshire, Worcestershire
Feeling, sensation. A word, like coolth, that shows how the -th ending for nouns was once much more widely used than it is today. From Leicestershire: ‘His feet is mortified, an’ hasn’t got no feelth in ’em’. Judging by the distribution, it was a useful word across a broad swathe of middle England.
fendy (adjective)
Cumberland, Durham, Lancashire, Northumberland, Scotland, Yorkshire
Clever, resourceful, good at managing, thrifty. From Yorkshire: ‘He’s a rare fendy little chap, he’s always ather fishin’ or mendin’ his net’. The origin is the verb defend. Evidently, up north, if you’re good at defending yourself, you’re likely to be resourceful in other ways.
ferrick or ferruck (verb or noun)
Berkshire, Northamptonshire, Oxfordshire, Warwickshire
To fidget or move about restlessly. From Warwickshire: ‘to ferruck about a house dusting corners’. And from Berkshire, a noun: ‘I be all in a ferrick’. There are several related senses, such as ‘scratch’, all involving rapid or jerky movement. The word is a pronunciation variant of ferret, which has had some use in colloquial standard English such as when people are rummaging through drawers looking for something. When people visit Hay-on-Wye, which has lots of bookshops, they go ferreting – but I like the sound of ferricking better.
finnying (adjective)
Suffolk
Timid, fearful. From the east of the county: ‘She’s that finnying she won’t go out after dark’. The related expression ‘No finny!’ means ‘No fear!’ There’s a possible connection with the supernatural beings known as Finns. Up in the Shetland Islands there was a long tradition, coming from Norway, of attributing magic powers to the Finns, who were said to be able to assume the form of amphibious animals, such as seals. One didn’t mess with the Finns. The word may well have spread in Anglo-Saxon times, when the Danes were numerous in eastern England, and developed its wider meaning.
flapsy (adjective)
Bedfordshire
Lazy, clownish; ill-bred, ill-natured. In the 1770s, someone is described as ‘a great flapsy fellow’. Any impudent person might be called a flapse, and if you flapsed someone you were being cheeky. The word was also used to mean ‘flabby’, which is itself a modification of earlier flappy. That’s probably where the meanings began: a general notion of ‘flabbiness’ led to an associated sense of ‘laziness’ and then to the somewhat less associated (but presumably often encountered) sense of ‘crabbiness’.
flaup (verb or noun)
Westmorland, Yorkshire
To strike with something flexible – the au pronounced as in flaw. From Yorkshire: ‘They’ve a set day at Darfield flee catchin, an a bit a rare good fun it is, for there they are wi their henkichers an dusters flaupin em dahn’. It’s probably an adaptation of flap, but it came to be used in quite a wide range of contexts. You could flaup down in a chair wearily. An awkward-looking hat or cap would be described as flauping. And if you wanted to tell someone off gently, you could give them a good flaup across the head or shoulders with something soft, such as a towel or a rolled-up newspaper.
flerk (noun or verb)
Berkshire, Hampshire, London, Wiltshire
To jerk about, flourish; to flip or flap anything about. From London: ‘Don’t keep flerking that in my face’. Clearly a useful word to capture that intermediate state between flicking and jerking – and also used for doing anything hastily and inefficiently. From Hampshire: ‘Just gie it a flerk over’.
flimp (adjective)
Gloucestershire, Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire, Suffolk, Warwickshire, Worcestershire
Limp, flabby. The blending of these two words was used to describe linen and clothing. A collar might be described as flimp if it lost its stiffness. In Worcestershire the blend was limp + flimsy: soft or delicate cloth was flimslimp.
flob or flub (noun or verb)
Oxfordshire, Scotland, Yorkshire
To puff, cause to swell up. Yeast added to flour would cause dough to flob. Clouds swollen with rain would be described as flobby. A swollen arm would be flobbed up. And it was a bluff put-down for inflated speech. From Yorkshire: ‘Tha’s all flob’. Also from Yorkshire: ‘I can make a bigger flob on my cheeks than thou can on thine’. This application of the word travelled: in Dorset and Wiltshire a popular term of abuse was flobberchops. And in 2010 someone added this to the Urban Dictionary, with the meaning ‘having chubby cheeks’. Dialect lives – online.
flunter (noun)
Cheshire, Lancashire, Yorkshire
A bit of rubbish, a state of confusion, an angry state of mind. This was a really popular word, widely used across the North of England. ‘He wur eh sitch a flunter’, writes Lancastrian Tom Bobbin in 1740. From Yorkshire: ‘His loom is badly eawt o’ flunter’ – out of order. If your hair was ‘all afflunters’ it would be in a terrible state. Another Lancastrian recommends having a flunter-drawer for odds and ends. I used to have one, for linguistic miscellanea, but it got too small. It’s a flunter room now. And that present-day usage reminds me that there’s no predicting the future of a word. In fact, in 2007, someone in north-east Iowa started a blog and decided to call it aflunters. ‘We all start out aflunters when we get out of bed in the morning’, the blogger begins.
footer-footer (verb)
Scotland
To walk in an affected, mincing manner. From Fife: ‘I like to see a man plant his feet firmly on the ground and no gang footer-footerin’ like a peacock wi’ its tail spread’. No further comment needed, really.
forethink or forthink (verb)
Cheshire, Lancashire, Scotland, Yorkshire
To consider beforehand; or, to regret afterwards. From North Yorkshire, about an event that had received little preparation: ‘There was nought foorethowten about’. If you were forethinking, you were being prudent. From Lancashire: ‘It made me rayther for-think ever settin’ eawt [out]’. This group of words was widely used in earlier centuries, but only forethought – in the sense of anticipation, rather than regret – has survived in standard English.
frab (verb)
Cheshire, Cumberland, Derbyshire, Lancashire, Westmorland, Yorkshire
To struggle, argue; worry, fidget; irritate, excite. From Cheshire: ‘You can frab a horse by pulling too hard at the reins’. The word seems to be a sound blend of fret and crab, or something similar, and the wide range of meanings suggests that it was very widely used, along with its derivatives. A baby teething? Frabby. Get out of bed on the wrong side? Frabbly. Irritated at someone? Frabbit.
frack (verb)
Gloucestershire, Norfolk, Northamptonshire, Suffolk
No, not the sense that makes the news these days. This verb turns up in various locations in such senses as ‘abound, crowd together, fill to excess’. From Northamptonshire: ‘The currant trees were as full as they could frack’. From East Anglia: ‘The church was fracking full’. So anything full to overflowing would be frackfull. In Gloucestershire if you were fracking you were fussing about.
fribble (verb)
Cheshire, Norfolk, Scotland, Suffolk, Warwickshire, Yorkshire
To trifle, idle, fuss. From Suffolk: ‘He goes fribbling about the whole day’. The word is a sound blend, probably from frivolous with the -bble ending used in words expressing repeated erratic movement (wobble, dribble . . .). I wasn’t expecting to find a linguistic sense – ‘to speak fine English’ – but there was one in Norfolk. In response to a teacher explaining that ‘grammar is the art of speaking and writing correctly’, a student replied: ‘Ow, miss, kinder what fooks in our part call framin or fribblin’.
frowsty (adjective)
Berkshire, Cheshire, Gloucestershire, Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, Nottinghamshire, Oxfordshire, Shropshire, Warwickshire, Wiltshire, Worcestershire
Musty, ill-smelling, not fresh; heavy-looking, peevish. It’s echoed in several other words (frown, frosty, crusty), but is probably closest to froward (= ‘from’ + ‘ward’) – going contrary to a desired state of affairs. From Worcestershire: ‘The snuff was frowsty’. From Shropshire: ‘W’y yo’ looken as sleepy an’ frousty this mornin’ as if yo’ ’adna bin i’ bed las’ night’. Words with a similar sound and meaning – frowsy or frowy – have been recorded in most parts of the British Isles.
fubsy (adjective)
Lancashire, Yorkshire
Plump, in a nice sort of way. Rudyard Kipling liked this word. In Jungle Book, Baloo uses it in one of his laws of the jungle:
‘Oppress not the cubs of the stranger, but hail them as Sister and Brother,
For though they are little and fubsy, it may be the Bear is their mother.’
When in 2008 a dictionary company announced a list of words it would omit from its next edition, The Times led a ‘save a word’ campaign, with fubsy supported by, among others, Stephen Fry.
fummasing or thumbasing (noun or verb)
Cheshire, Lancashire
Fumbling with the hands as if the fingers were all thumbs. From Cheshire: ‘What art fummasin with at th’lock?’ The source is thumb, with the replacement of th by f – showing that this sound change isn’t solely a modern (‘Estuary English’) phenomenon. The word would also be used if you were just dawdling. From Lancashire: ‘Roger kept telling hur as he seed hur fummashin abeawt that hoo’d be too late’.
funch (verb)
Dorset, Hampshire, Isle of Wight
Push, thrust, strike with the fist. From the Isle of Wight: ‘Don’t keep a funchen me zo’. As a punch usually involves the fist anyway, it’s likely that funch was used for less aggressive blows.