quabble (noun)
Herefordshire
Confusion. ‘My head’s all of a quabble’. To quob or quop was to tremble or throb. There are echoes of other imitative words, such as wobble and quiver. We find quaggle used in a similar sense further south.
qualmified (adjective)
Norfolk
Sickly-looking. ‘The mawthers [girls] all look so qualmified’. It’s clearly from qualm, in its sense of ‘sudden fit of nausea’, a word that came to be adapted to any situation which might give rise to a feeling of faintness or sickness. In Northamptonshire, close or sultry weather was said to be qualmy.
quank (adjective)
Cheshire, Herefordshire, Shropshire, Warwickshire, Wiltshire, Worcestershire
Still, quiet. From Shropshire: ‘As quank as a mouze’. There was a verb use too, meaning ‘subdue, quieten’. From Warwickshire, about a restive horse: ‘You must quank him, or he’ll master you’. Someone who settled disputes was a quanker. Further south, the word appears as quamp. From Gloucestershire: ‘As quamp as a mouse’.
queechy (adjective)
Leicestershire, Somerset, Staffordshire, Warwickshire
Sickly, ailing, feeble. From Somerset: ‘They be a poor queechy old couple’. The origin isn’t clear. I suspect it arose from people ‘feeling queer’, with the addition of an ending that often connotes unpleasant things, such as blotchy, itchy, reechy.
quezzen (verb)
Norfolk, Suffolk
To burn and smoke without flame. ‘If the fuel be damp, the fire quezzens out’. You would also be quezzening if you smothered the fire with sand or earth, or tried to eliminate weeds by covering them in the same way. It’s probably a local pronunciation and adaptation of squeeze, as squezzen is also recorded in Suffolk.
quiddle (verb or noun)
Cornwall, Dorset, Gloucestershire, Hampshire, Isle of Wight, Sussex, Wiltshire, Worcestershire
To make a fuss about trifles, fiddle about, fret. From Sussex: ‘A quiddles over his cloase [clothes]’. As a noun, it meant a fussy, over-particular person, or a whim. From Wiltshire: ‘She’s quite a quiddle about the house’. From Cornwall: ‘She’s as full of quiddles as an egg is full of meat’. The word reached America. Ralph Waldo Emerson talks in his essay on manners from English Traits about the Englishman who is ‘a quiddle about his toast and his chop’.
quignogs (noun)
Cornwall
Ridiculous notions or conceits. ‘You’re full of quignogs’. The origin isn’t clear. It may well be an application of whig, an old name for a Nonconformist, with the nog element referring to the head (as with noggin, and compare noggle, above).
quizcuss (noun)
Cheshire
A meddlesome, inquisitive person. A tenant complained that his landlord was ‘a regular quizcuss’. Cuss, of course, is from curse. In Lincolnshire, a prying person was called, simply, a quiz.
quob (noun)
Cornwall, Dorset, Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Isle of Wight, Leicestershire, Oxfordshire, Shropshire, Wiltshire, Worcestershire
A marshy spot, bog, quagmire (also called a quobmire). The word was widely used figuratively. If something was ina mess or in a heap, it was said to be all of a quob. From Cornwall: railway porters taking luggage out of a train ‘pitch it down all of a quob’.