nang or gnang (verb)
Cumberland, Dorset, Kent, Somerset, Sussex, Westmorland, Yorkshire
Of a pain: to keep up a dull, continuous aching. From Yorkshire: ‘This old tooith is gnangin’ at it agean’. It could also mean ‘complain, worry’, like the crying of a fretful child or the continual grumbling of an ill-tempered adult. From Kent: ‘He keeps on nanging at me’. The origin is obscure: it may simply be a variant of nag, with the sound of the ng adding an element of persistence.
nazzard (noun)
Cumberland, Lancashire, Westmorland, Yorkshire
A silly, insignificant, mean person. As with other nouns beginning with n- or a- (see amplush, attercop) people often couldn’t decide where to draw the line between the indefinite article and the noun: is it a nazzard or an azzard? The original form seems to be nazzard, as in this Westmorland example: ‘Didta ivver see sic a wurm itten nazzard i’ thi life?’ The origin is obscure. There may be a link with French nez, ‘nose’ – perhaps recalling a contemptuous gesture made by flicking or waggling the fingers against the nose (as is still done today).
nesh (adjective)
Cheshire, Cornwall, Cumberland, Derbyshire, Devon, Dorset, Gloucestershire, Hampshire, Herefordshire, Lancashire, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire, Northumberland, Nottinghamshire, Scotland, Shropshire, Somerset, Staffordshire, Wales, Warwickshire, Westmorland, Wiltshire, Worcestershire, Yorkshire
Soft to the touch; delicate in health; brittle, crumbly; damp [weather]; dainty, timid. The Old English word for ‘soft’, hnesce, developed a wide range of senses throughout Britain, and entered American dialects too. From Somerset, about beans: ‘They’re too nesh to gather yet awhile’. From Herefordshire: ‘The sheep be doing fairish, but some of the lambs be very nesh this time’. If you were nesh-stomached, you had a very delicate appetite. And if you had a timid-looking face, you were nesh-phizzed.
nickerers (noun)
Scotland
New shoes that make a creaking noise. The root of the word is nick, in its sense of ‘make a clicking sound’. In Scotland and the North of England, nick-nack was an alternative name for the tick-tock of a clock. In Cornwall, if you had nickety-knock you were having palpitations. The etymology isn’t known. There could be a connection with horses: nicker was used throughout the British Isles to mean ‘neigh’, and the place in the mouth where the gh sound in neigh was made in Old English is the same as where a k sound was made.
niff (noun)
Cornwall, Devon, Gloucestershire, Shropshire, Somerset, Surrey, Sussex
A silent, sullen feeling of resentment; a quarrel. From Somerset: ‘Let her alone, her’ve o’ny a-got a bit of a niff, her’ll zoon come o’ that again’. Someone offended would be niffed or niffy. The source isn’t clear. It might have been a variant of sniff. In Sussex niff was used to describe a sniff or smell. It might also have been a variant of miff, ‘huff’.
noggle (verb)
Cornwall, Hampshire, Shropshire, Wales, Yorkshire
To manage anything with difficulty; especially, to walk with difficulty because weak or heavily laden. From Pembrokeshire: ‘I was main weak, I could hardly walk, but I noggled it somehow’. The speaker was thus feeling noggly. The word was also used for mental weakness – you could be noggle-headed, ‘stupid’ – and this may be the earlier usage, from nog or knag, a Germanic word meaning ‘a block of wood’, hence ‘blockhead’.
noof (adjective)
Scotland
Sheltered from the weather, snug; neat, trim. From Galloway: ‘The frien’ly firs, they keep it noof’. From Kirkcudbrightshire: ‘His wife was always bra’ [smart] and unco’ [very] noof’. A verb developed, ‘to enjoy oneself leisurely’. From Lanarkshire, in an 1805 poem by George McIndoe: ‘The laird sat noofan o’er his glass, / Baith [both] rum and brandy, Naething less, / Stood sparkling on the table’. The etymology is unknown. It could simply be a word that developed out of a noise – in this case, a sound expressing satisfaction.
norman (noun)
Oxfordshire, Shropshire, Suffolk, Yorkshire
A tyrannical person. From Suffolk, from a farm-labourer about a master credited with tyrannical conduct: ‘Ah, he’s a reg’lar Norman, he is’. This presumably dates way back to 1066. I place myself in some danger by including this entry, as it is my untyrannical wife’s maiden name.
novels (noun)
Scotland
News, tidings. This sense of the noun was widespread in Britain 200 years before it came to be used in the modern sense of a long fictional prose narrative, and it survived in some parts of the country. From Renfrewshire, an eighteenth-century letter-writer: ‘When you favour me with a line, I’ll be glad to have your thoughts of it, with all your novels’.
nunty (adjective)
Cumberland, Kent, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Northamptonshire, Northumberland, Nottinghamshire, Shropshire, Suffolk, Sussex, Warwickshire, Yorkshire
Of dress: stiff, formal, old-fashioned, precise. The word was most often used to describe the way a woman was dressed, but it could also be used for men, or a piece of clothing. From Leicestershire: ‘A nunty little man’, ‘A nunty cap’. The word also developed some negative meanings, such as shabby or dowdy in dress, or cross and sulky in manner. From Sussex: ‘Ye be middlin’ nunty this marnin’ seemingly; I doant known naun what’s putt ye out’. The etymology is unknown. Another meaning of nunty was ‘stout and short’, which suggests it could have been a rhyming relation of stunt or stump.
nurble (verb)
Westmorland
To wear away slowly. Of shoes: ‘Thoo’s nurbled thi shun off at t’teeas [toes]’. Like many such words, the origin is probably playfully imitative, following the pattern of burble (from bubble), with an association of n- with slowness (see nang above). We still invent words in this way: in cricket, a new colloquialism emerged in the 1980s, to nurdle – ‘to accumulate runs slowly by working the ball away gently’. The Times reports that a batsman ‘crept, nudged and nurdled his way towards the total’.