gadwaddick (verb)
Norfolk
To jaunt, go on a pleasure trip. ‘They do stare, these Broadland children, although the novelty of yachtin’ and other folk gadwaddickin’ on the Broads is wearing off’. In Worcestershire, wadgiking was to walk about in an awkward manner. The etymology isn’t entirely clear. Gad is a common variant of go (as in gad about), but the wad element is obscure. It might be related to wade.
gangagous (adjective)
Devon
Careful, mindful – prononced gang-gay-juss. The word is an adaptation of gang, ‘go’. ‘I’ve bin moore gangag’ous o’ my mouth than I hev o’ religion’, said a man who stayed at home from church to eat fruit.
gashly (adjective)
Cornwall, Devon, Leicestershire, Suffolk, Sussex, Warwickshire, Wiltshire, Worcestershire
Terrible, dismal, hideous. An adaptation of ghastly. From Sussex: ‘It be a gashly sight’. But it had a more general intensifying sense, much as we might say something was ‘awful’. In Cornwall, a man was said to have ‘a gashly temper’. In Wiltshire, a hedge was described as ‘gashly high’. It had a modern reincarnation in Edward Gorey’s macabre alphabet book, The Gashlycrumb Tinies (1963): ‘A is for Amy who fell down the stairs . . . B is for Basil assaulted by bears . . .’
gazooly or gazol (verb)
Cornwall
To be constantly uttering laments. A man who was very depressed admitted to ‘gazoling all day long’. Another talked about the way he was ‘gazoolying’. The origin seems to be the French verb gazouiller, ‘warble’ – as when a young bird is learning to sing.
giddling (adjective)
Northamptonshire, Oxfordshire, Staffordshire, Warwickshire, Worcestershire
Unsteady, unreliable, thoughtless, rickety. An adaptation of giddy, applied to both people and objects. From Staffordshire: ‘I wonder at him fulin’ wi’ such a giddlin’ wench like her’. From Worcestershire: ‘Dunna yu get into that thahr boat. ’Tis a giddling thing, an’ you’ll sure to be drownded’.
glack (noun or verb)
Scotland
Handful, morsel. From Aberdeenshire: a woman ‘taks frae her pouch a glack of bread and cheese’. Glac was Gaelic for a narrow valley, or glen. Any V-like shape might then be called a glack, such as the fork of a tree, a fork in a road, the angle between the thumb and the forefinger, or the hollow of a hand when it was cupped to hold something. If I glacked your mitten, I would be giving you a tip – or a bribe.
glat (noun)
Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Shropshire, Wales, Westmorland, Worcestershire
A gap in a hedge – or in your mouth, through loss of teeth. From Worcestershire: ‘He’s met him a-tryin’ to git through a glat i’ the hedge’. From Shropshire, a snippet of dialogue: ‘I thought yo’ wun gwein [going] to marry the cook at the paas’n’s [parson’s].’ ‘Aye, but ’er’d gotten too many glats i’ the mouth fur me.’
glorys (noun)
Westmorland, Yorkshire
The eyes. From Yorkshire: ‘My word, but he did oppen his glorys when he gate that bill’. It’s a development of glore, ‘stare, gaze fixedly’, which has links with glower and glare. Gloorers was an old word for spectacles.
glox (verb)
Hampshire, Wiltshire
Of liquids: to make a gurgling sound when shaken inside a vessel. From Wiltshire: ‘Fill the barrel full, John, or else it will glox in carriage’. In Scotland and parts of the North of England, the word appears as glock or gluck.
gnang see nang
goddle-house (noun)
Warwickshire
A house that has been vacant a long time and needs repair. ‘Wonder when the Squire’ll let that goddle house’. Goddle is probably derived from ‘God will’ – the future of the place is thought of as being in the hands of God. The label was never applied to an ordinary empty house. It had to be one that was on the verge of becoming a ruin.
granch or graunch (verb)
Cheshire, Derbyshire, Gloucestershire, Lancashire, Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire, Shropshire, Warwickshire, Worcestershire, Yorkshire
To crunch between the teeth, grind the teeth, eat noisily – a sound blend of such words as grind and crunch. From Warwickshire: ‘I used to granch up all the crusteses’. The word was also used to describe the noise joints make when they crack, and to any scrunching sound. From Leicestershire: ‘I heard the ice graunching under the wheels of the carriage’.
grob (verb)
Durham, Lincolnshire, Yorkshire
To search by the sense of feeling, as with the hand in any dark place. From Yorkshire: ‘she’s grobbing in her pocket an’ can fin nowt’. It’s a variant of grope, but the short vowel and the final -b convey a rougher, earthier, more active nuance. We see the same sort of energy in the way the word was also used to describe children playfully digging in soil or mud – grobbing about. And the idea of doing it over and over is there in a related verb, grobble.
grumptious (adjective)
Yorkshire
Inclined to grumbling, irritable, sullen. Quite a few old dialect adjectives derive from grumble, such as grumly, grumphy, grumply, and the simple grum – clearly related to grim. Grumpy was the form that entered standard colloquial English. It lacks the nuance of grumptious which – like cautious, ambitious, superstitious, and others – has a word-ending that expresses the notion ‘full of’ or ‘characteristic of’. Any of us can be grumpy at times; but grumptious better describes someone for whom grumpiness is a character trait.
grut (noun)
Norfolk
Used in the phrase to leave a swede in the grut: to let alone, to leave a story untold. ‘Lave that swede in the grut. That yarn’s gettin’ very near as old as your grandfather’. Grut, or groot, was ‘mud, spoil, earth’. It’s related to grit.
gruttling (noun)
Norfolk, Suffolk
A strange, inexplicable noise. From Norfolk: ‘I hear a gruttling in the chimbly [chimney]’. It’s probably a blend of such words as grunt and rattling. A Suffolk commentator thought it was like the noise of someone being throttled.
gurly (adjective)
Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Ireland, Northumberland, Scotland, Somerset
Said of weather, when it’s rough, stormy, cold, or bleak. From Lothian: ‘There’s a strang gurly blast, blawin’ snell [sharply] frae the north’. The word is a variant of growl, or a representation of the sound of growling, which in Scotland was often gurr. Gurly was also used for snarling dogs, gnarled trees, and surly people.