lab-dab (noun)
Norfolk, Suffolk
A profuse perspiration. ‘The wench is all of a lab dab’. Labber was a widely used word for activities associated with water. From Tyneside: ‘splashing and labbering about i’ the tide’. Muddy roads would be labbery, as would rainy weather. Treacle was called labber-gob in Yorkshire because of the mess it made on your mouth. There are clear phonetic links with dab and dabble, and also with lap. In Essex the word turns up as lap-dab.
lally-wow (noun)
Lincolnshire
A cat. ‘The lally-wow is kittling’. The second part echoes the cat’s sound, as so many similar words do, such as mew, mewl, and (common in Middle English) wrawe and wrawl. The first part is not so clear. It may be an adaptation of babytalk la-la or lulla, used to infants and animals, and which gave rise to the verb lall and the noun lullaby in standard English. Or it may be a version of caterwaul.
larmy (adjective)
Somerset
Sorrowful. From French larmeux, ‘full of tears’ – a borrowing that somehow reached Somerset but didn’t enter the standard language. The nearest we get is the old architectural term larmier, referring to the coping on a wall that serves to throw off the (drops, ‘tears’ of) rain.
lassified (adjective)
Yorkshire
Young-looking. Said of women, lassie being a widely used word for a young woman or little girl in Scotland and the North Country. ‘E passed t’remark ’at [that] ye were a bit lassified’. We might expect laddified to be the male equivalent, but it was never recorded.
leary or leery (adjective)
Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Hampshire, Somerset, Sussex
Hungry, empty, faint and exhausted from hunger. From Dorset: ‘I am that leery I can feel my stomach rubbing against my backbone’. From Somerset: ‘I was that leary, I was fir t’eat a raw turmut [turnip]’. The word was also widely used across the South of England without the -y ending in the same sense. From Worcestershire: ‘I feels mighty leer, I mun ’ave a bit of nuncheon’. Further north, it had the more general meaning of something being ‘empty’ or ‘unladen’. Leary crossed the Atlantic too, and is recorded in some American dialect dictionaries. It all started in Old English, where the word for ‘emptiness’ was lærnes. And ‘empty’ is leer in German and laar in Dutch.
lennock (adjective)
Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Hampshire, Somerset, Sussex, Yorkshire
Limp, flabby; pliant, flexible; pendulous. A word that had a wide range of applications. People, parts of the body, buildings, parts of buildings, plants, even corpses could all be described as lennock or lennucky. From Yorkshire: ‘Leavin’ this stick o’ rhubub aht t’door all t’neet hes made it lennucky’. There’s probably a historical link with long and length.
lerry or lirry (noun)
Hertfordshire, Lincolnshire
A whim, fancy, caprice; a pretext, trick, fib. From Lincolnshire: ‘He’s full of his lerries’. In the Isle of Wight, it turns up as lurry, meaning ‘loose talk’, and spellings from other locations around the South of England show the other two vowels – larry and lorry. The word’s source is probably the most scholarly in this book. It’s a shortening of liriripe or liripoop, which describes the long tail of a graduate’s hood. The meaning then shifted to what someone would say or do: you would know your liripoop – know your part. It would have been only a short step from there for ordinary folk to abbreviate the word to describe scholarly speech they felt to be obscure or evasive, and then to use it for anyone putting on airs or trying to hide the truth.
lewth (noun)
Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Gloucestershire, Hampshire, Herefordshire, Ireland, Isle of Wight, Kent, Somerset, Surrey, Sussex, Wiltshire
Shelter, protection from the wind. From the Isle of Wight: ‘Let’s get into the lewth’. It’s originally an Old English word, which came to be used across the whole of southern England, and travelled across to Ireland. Adjectives were lootheed and lewthy for a place that was warm and snug. From Somerset: ‘a proper loothy spot’. In a general sense it was used for anything that provided warmth, such as coats, stoves, and the sun. A thin coat would have ‘no lewth in it’, they used to say in Wiltshire.
licksome (adjective)
Cheshire, Derbyshire, Flintshire, Herefordshire, Lancashire
Pleasant, agreeable, amiable; handsome, neat. From Lancashire, on an array of stalls in a market: ‘Such licksome stuff aw ne’er did see i’ Englondshire afore’. A good-looking person would also be described as licksome, as would a handsome animal. In Cheshire it was chiefly used for places, such as a ‘licksome garden’. The origin is apparent in the spelling likesome, which had some currency in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and which was common in Yorkshire in the sense of ‘desirable, loveable’.
lig (verb or noun)
Norfolk, Suffolk
To carry with difficulty; to pull, drag heavily. From Norfolk: ‘They ligged the ground rope in’. You could also liggle it. As a noun, lig meant a heavy load, or the lift or pull you’d have to perform to move it. In Suffolk, something might be given ‘a good tidy lig’. There’s a phonetic link to lug, a borrowing from Old Norse in the Middle Ages, which came to be much more widely used throughout the British Isles.
like-shence or likshence (noun)
Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire
Likelihood, chance. From Northamptonshire: ‘No like-shence of his coming to-day’. A blend of likelihood and chance, which seems to capture a meaning somewhere between probability and possibility. ‘There’s a likechance of rain’. Will it rain? Maybe, maybe not.
limbless or limless (adjective)
Dorset, Isle of Wight, Somerset
Past repair, all to pieces, utterly destroyed. From the Isle of Wight: ‘Git out o’ the way or thee’st be knocked limless’. Standard English used the word too, but literally.
limpsy or limsy (adjective)
Essex, Hampshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, Sussex
Limp, loose, flabby; idle, lazy. From Norfolk: ‘A loose lazy fellow is said to be a limpsy rascal’. But a damaged arm might also be described as limpsy, as would a lazy way of walking or a plant that failed to stay erect. From Essex: ‘D’yer see them feathers stickin’ in her ’at? They’re limsy’. The word has also been recorded in some American dialects.
linnard (noun)
Somerset
The last to finish a meal. It appears that, when working in the field, the man who finished his meal last had to do all the clearing away of the remnants. ‘Thee beest linnard’. The origin isn’t known. I suspect a link with an Old English verb – perhaps linian ‘leave’ or linnan ‘cease’. The -ard ending has the sense of ‘one who does what is discreditable’, as in drunkard, laggard, and sluggard.
lobstropolous (adjective)
Northumberland
Loud, mischievous. From a Tyneside song: ‘Lobstrop’lus fellows we kicked them’. It’s an adaptation of obstreperous, with the addition of lob ‘lump’, widely used in the North of England to describe someone who was clumsy or idle, especially if they were also well built.
logaram (noun)
Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire, Rutland
Balderdash, rubbish, nonsense; a long story somewhat embellished. From Rutland: ‘They’ve been saying ever such logarams’. It’s recorded in Bedfordshire in the spelling lockrem, but the other form shows its unusual etymology more clearly. It is from logarithm.
longcanny (noun)
Northumberland, Yorkshire
The limit of endurance; the end of one’s financial resources. From Yorkshire: ‘Thee keep thi brass in thi pocket, he’s allus at the long canny’. A woman in the advanced stages of pregnancy was said to be ‘on the longcanny’. And you could use the word to describe the feeling of exhaustion at the end of a very long journey or of reaching your limit when trying to lift a collection of especially heavy objects. Its origin lies in the phrase ‘long as I can’.
looby (adjective)
Cornwall
Of the weather: warm, muggy, misty. The word is from Old Cornish loob, meaning ‘slime, sludge’, and commonly encountered in the tin-mining industry, where it referred to the vessel that receives the unwanted earth after the tin has been removed. Lubricate is related.
lorricker (noun)
Cumberland, Lancashire, Westmorland, Yorkshire
The tongue; the mouth. From Yorkshire: ‘Oppen thi gob an’ shooit aht thi lorriker.’ The word has the same probable origin as in lally-wow: the mouth is the place where you ‘lall’ and your tongue the thing you lall with. In the north-west, you would hear it also as lallacker. The switch between l and r often takes place among dialects.
lozzuck or lossack (verb or noun)
Cheshire, Lancashire, Shropshire, Staffordshire
To lounge, loll, idle, loaf. From Staffordshire: ‘Do’ come lossackin’ about here, I’m busy.’ If you were ‘doing a lozzuck’ you were having an idle time. From Lancashire: ‘Th’ day after we did a lozzick, oitch [each] gooin his own road, an’ spendin his time as he’d a mind.’ Origin unclear, but possibly related to loose or lose – as in ‘at a loose end’.
lumrified (adjective)
Wales
Of a room: in disorder. From Pembrokeshire. ‘She be’n’t a good hausekeeper at all; every room is lumrified’. The source is probably lumber, in its sense of ‘useless odds and ends’. The b was often dropped in dialects. In Yorkshire, for example, lumber was sometimes written as lummer.