hagg (noun)
Nottinghamshire
A hole in a road. ‘Tek some stones an’ fill up that hag i’ th’ road’. A road with many haggs would be haggy. On the moors, it would be a piece of soft bog. It’s related to other Germanic words with senses to do with cutting or breaking, such as hew and hack. Applied to people, hagged or haggit meant ‘worn out, tired, harassed’.
hainish or ainish (adjective)
Essex, Hertfordshire
Unpleasant, especially of the weather; also, awkward, ill-tempered. From Hertfordshire: ‘He was such an ainish old man’. It’s probably a local adaptation of heinous.
harriage (noun)
Devon, Norfolk, Northamptonshire, Suffolk, Wiltshire
A disturbance, bustle, fuss; confusion, disorder. Spelling varies greatly, reflecting pronunciations with both r and l. From Wiltshire: ‘What a hallege!’ – what a row! In parts of Suffolk, the nearby port led to a local adaptation, go to Harwich, meaning ‘go to rack and ruin’. The word probably comes from a French loanword in Middle English, orageux, ‘stormy’.
hask (adjective)
Cheshire, Cumberland, Derbyshire, Ireland, Lancashire, Lincolnshire, Scotland, Staffordshire, Warwickshire, Yorkshire
Of weather: dry, parching, or piercingly cold; also, rough to the touch; bitter to the taste. This was one of the most widely used dialect words in the British Isles, turning up in a variety of forms, such as harsk, aske, and yask. The common origin seems to be harsk, pronounced hask in the north, which eventually became harsh in standard English. People would talk about ‘a hask wind’ or a cow with ‘a hask hide’; sour plums would be ‘very hask’, as would sugarless tea (to someone who takes sugar).
havage or haveage (noun)
Cornwall, Devon
Race, lineage, family stock. From Devon: ‘Her come vrom a good haveage – the very daps [likeness] of her mother’. Someone from a family of ill repute would be said to be ‘o’ bad havage’. The source is the verb have, in its sense of ‘come into possession of’.
havey-cavey (adjective)
Cumberland, Derbyshire, Lancashire, Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire, Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire
Unsteady, uncertain, doubtful, all in confusion. From Yorkshire: ‘It was havey-cavey whether I came or not’, ‘Mi heead’s all eyvy-keyvy this mornin’. The formation is like higgledy-piggledy and other reduplicating compounds, and is recorded in a wide range of pronunciations and spellings, such as heevy-skeevy (in Cumberland) and heavely-keavely (in Derbyshire). In Lincolnshire, if you were on the havey-quavey you were making inquiries or checking up on something.
heigh-go-mad (adverb)
Derbyshire, Lancashire, Yorkshire
Wildly, furiously, with great force – the first part often spelled hei or hey. From Yorkshire: ‘Sum [factories] we chimleys on em, an’t smook putherin at tops like heigomad’. From Lancashire: ‘The horse broke the traces and ran off like heygomad’.
hengments (noun)
Yorkshire
Odds and ends, bric-a-brac, especially things hanging on a wall. ‘I talked a bit t’maister about t’pictures and t’little hengments ’at wor heer an’ theer’. In the singular form hangment, it had a totally different meaning. What the hangment! was an oath, widely used across the North and Midlands, derived from hanging in its sense of execution (in the same way as hang it all! is still said today).
hettle (verb)
Durham, Northumberland, Scotland, Yorkshire
To act in haste or anger. From Northumberland, a pitman, charged with throwing his lamp down the pit-shaft, said in his defence: ‘He nobbut hettled it away an’ it stotted off the flat sheets an’ ganned doon the shaft’. If you were hettle-tongued, you were foul-mouthed. The word comes from Old English hatol – ‘full of hatred’.
hocksy (adjective)
Berkshire, Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire, Wiltshire
Dirty, muddy, miry, soft, sticky – often spelled hoxey, hoxy, or oxy. It seems to refer to any ground into which the feet sink. From Wiltshire: ‘It’s about two miles in vine weather; but when it’s hocksey, like this, we allows a mile for slippin’ back’. The word is probably related to hock, referring to part of a leg. In this area, and also further north, to hock meant ‘trample earth into a muddy condition’, and thus to cause a mess as a result. From the West Midlands: ‘Don’t come a oxing over these stones what I’ve jest cleaned with them dirty shoes o’ yorn’.
huckmuck (adjective or noun)
Berkshire, Devon, Dorset, Hampshire, Wiltshire
Confusion caused by all things being out of place, a muddle. From Devon: ‘I nuver did zee sich a huck-muck place in awl my born days’. Further north, the same meaning was expressed by huckermucker. It was also one of the senses of hugger-mugger, used throughout England and Scotland – and made famous in its sense of ‘secrecy’ by Shakespeare in Hamlet, when King Claudius describes how ineptly he has handled the death of Polonius: ‘we have done but greenly / In hugger-mugger to inter him’.
hummy (adjective)
Wales
Musty, going bad with damp. From Pembrokeshire: ‘The bacon is gone hummy’. ‘This pan smells hummy’. The source is hum, in its sense of ‘smell disagreeably’, which presumably arose from the low murmuring noise made by flies and other insects attracted to rotting food.