madancholy (adjective)
Lancashire, Yorkshire
Very vexed, sulky. From Yorkshire: ‘Shoo’d be as madancholy as owght [anything] if tha wor to tell her shoo’d a wart ov her nooase [nose].’ It’s an ingenious adaptation of melancholy.
maggle (verb)
Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire, Worcestershire
To worry, tease; tire out, exhaust. From Oxfordshire: ‘I be maggled to dyeath’ – said especially if one is hot and tired. The origin isn’t clear. There may be a link with mangle.
mang (noun or verb)
Devon, Durham, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire, Northumberland, Scotland, Somerset, Wiltshire, Yorkshire
A mixture, a confused mass. From Leicestershire: ‘All of a mang, loike’. The word is from Old English gemang, ‘mixture, union’. As a verb, it meant ‘mix together, mess about’. From Somerset: ‘The bags was a bust, and zo the zeeud [seed] was a-mangd all up together’. It was also what would be said if someone touched food with the hand – such as choosing a piece of cake and then changing your mind. From Northumberland: ‘Tyek the piece o’ cyek ye mang’d forst’. And the outcome after producing a confused mass of something? A mangment.
mattery (adjective)
Northumberland
Wordy, loquacious. Said of someone making a fuss: ‘What a mattery old man!’ This is matter in the sense of ‘content’. In Cumberland, if you got into a muddle while talking you would be matter-fangled.
mawbish (adjective)
Norfolk, Suffolk
Intoxicated. From Norfolk: ‘Some o’ they fellows ’ll go home mawbish’. Maw was in general dialect use in Britain for a mouth or throat. It originally referred to the stomach of an animal, and when used for humans there was often a nuance of eating (or drinking) as much as possible, to stave off hunger (or thirst).
mettly (adjective)
Cheshire
Quick-tempered, irritable. ‘He was very sharp an’ snappy, was th’ owd ’un [old one] – despert mettly’. It’s a development of mettle (as in ‘on your mettle’), which was used idiomatically across the North of England and Scotland in related senses. If you were over sharp mettle you were too hasty-tempered. If you were mettle to your teeth you were full of spirit.
middlemer (adjective)
Cumberland, Westmorland, Yorkshire
Central, middle; coming between the eldest and youngest in age. From Cumberland: ‘Is that t’auldest lad er youngest?’ ‘It’s nowder, it’s middlemer’.
mim (adjective)
Berkshire, Cornwall, Durham, Ireland, Norfolk, Northumberland, Oxfordshire, Scotland, Suffolk, Yorkshire
Prim, demure; affectedly modest or shy; prudish. The word is imitative of the action of pursing up the mouth when behaving in this way. There’s a Scottish proverb: ‘Maidens should be mim till they’re married, and then they may burn kirks’. And a sad tale from Berkshire: ‘She zet there zo mim as I cood’nt get on no how, an’ zo I got up an’ come away’. The word gave rise to a wide range of expressions with similar meaning, such as mim-mouthed, miminy-mouthed, mimmocky, and mimsey.
mirligo (noun)
Scotland
Dizziness, disordered vision. From Edinburgh: ‘My own een [eyes] began to reel with the merligoes’. In the Shetland Isles the verbs mirr and mirl – both borrowings from Old Norse – were used to express notions of trembling and rapid movement. An alternative spelling shows a popular etymology: merrilygo.
miscomfrumple (verb)
Northamptonshire
To rumple, crease. A local writer gave this definition: ‘If one female sits so close to another as to rumple or crease her dress, by pressing or sitting upon it, she is said to miscomfrumple it.’ The formation is echoed in other words from the same part of the country: see discomfrontle.
misword (noun)
Berkshire, Cheshire, Dorset, Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Kent, Suffolk, Surrey, Sussex, Warwickshire, Wiltshire, Worcestershire, Yorkshire
An angry, unkind, or abusive word; blame, censure, disagreement. From Warwickshire: ‘He never gave me a misword all his life’. There are a dozen examples recorded, from Cheshire to Kent, all expressing the same sentiment – of never having had a row. Just one, from Dorset, suggests that relationships were not always so peaceable: ‘But, look ee, I beaint a-gwine to take no miswords vrom thy vo’k [folk]’.
modge (noun)
Nottinghamshire, Warwickshire
Confusion; a state of dirt and disorder. From Nottinghamshire: ‘The floor was all of a modge’. The word also turns up as a verb, describing the way someone gets into a muddle, especially in the phrase codge and modge. Advice to a Warwickshire seamstress: ‘Don’t codge and modge at that patch any longer’.
mome (noun)
Westmorland, Yorkshire
A fool, blockhead; a dull ignorant person. From the North Country: ‘Away with this foolish mome!’ It was also used as an adjective with the general meaning of ‘dull’. Lewis Carroll thought it to be a nonsense word, when he talked about the ‘mome raths’ in his Jabberwocky. Humpty Dumpty isn’t certain of its meaning: he thinks it might mean that the raths (‘green pigs’) had ‘lost their way’. They wouldn’t have found it nonsense up north.
mortacious (adverb)
Cheshire, Kent, Norfolk, Suffolk, Sussex
Extremely, exceedingly. From Sussex: ‘He was so mortacious hungered he tumbled in de street’. It was a localized variant of mortal when used as an intensifier – as in Warwickshire: ‘this is mortal poor beer’ – which was widespread across the British Isles, and a feature of many American dialects.
motty (noun)
Cheshire, Derbyshire, Lancashire, Warwickshire, Yorkshire
A word, talk, speech, uttered opinion. From Lancashire: ‘Thou’rt al’ays out wi’ ty motty’. The word was usually heard in the expression to put one’s motty in, ‘to interfere impertinently in a conversation, stick one’s oar in’. From Cheshire: ‘What art puttin thy motty in for?’ The origin is the French word mot, ‘word, utterance’, which arrived in English in the sixteenth century and soon came to be pronounced ‘mott’.
muckment (noun)
Cumberland, Lancashire, Lincolnshire, Yorkshire
Dirt, mud, filth. From Yorkshire: ‘Sam all weet [wet] an streaked wi’ ashes an all sooarts o’ muckment.’ The -ment suffix is normally used to make an abstract noun from a verb (as in astonish > astonishment), but here, added to another noun, it adds a nuance of widespread presence. A floor covered in muckment is likely to be more messy – and more diversely messy – than one just covered in muck.
mulligrubs (noun)
Berkshire, Cheshire, Devon, Essex, Hampshire, Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Nottinghamshire, Oxfordshire, Scotland, Shropshire, Somerset, Suffolk, Sussex, Warwickshire, Wiltshire, Yorkshire
A stomach-ache, the colic; any imaginary ailment. There was hardly a corner of the country that didn’t use this word, which is recorded in an extraordinary variety of forms – molligrubs, molligrumphs, moolygrubs, murdigrups, and much more. From Berkshire: ‘What’s the matter with you – got the mulligrubs’. If you were in the mulligrubs, you would be low-spirited and sulky. It could also refer to an ill-natured person. From Devon: ‘Her’s a proper old mullygrub’. The word may come from a kind of grub that lives in the mull (‘mould’).
mumple (verb)
Scotland
To seem as if going to vomit. Mump was widely used in England and Scotland to mean ‘mumble’, ‘munch’, and other effects involving the mouth, such as chewing, nibbling, and grimacing. If you suppressed a chuckle, you would be ‘mumpling in the mouth’. And yes, mumps is related, the name coming from the swellings around the chin associated with the disease.