yadder (verb)
Cumberland
To talk incessantly, chatter. ‘Thoo yadders and talks like a gurt [great] feul’. Ya- was a popular source of words to do with speech – yab, yack, yaddle, yaff, yaggle, yammer . . . – all having a similar echoic origin to gabble, and perhaps originally related to jaw. The dialect use has continued in colloquial standard English to capture the notion of talk going on and on (‘yada, yada, yada . . .’).
yar (adjective)
Cumberland, Lancashire, Yorkshire
Harsh of taste, sour – also heard in yarrish and yarry, with the same meaning. From Lancashire: ‘This ale’s rayther yarrish’. It’s a local pronunciation of wharre, the crab-apple, whose juice is known for its sourness. In Yorkshire, they would say that something was as sour as wharre.
yeeke (verb)
Cheshire, Yorkshire
To itch. The word was often written without the first consonant – ‘I yeeke’ and ‘I eke’ would have sounded the same. From Yorkshire: ‘I eke all o’er’. The source is an Old English verb, gyccan, ‘itch’, with the g pronounced like a y, and the cc like ch.
yonderly (adjective)
Cheshire, Cumberland, Lancashire, Westmorland, Yorkshire
Vague, absent-minded, weak in mind or body, anxious, depressed in health or spirits. From Lancashire: ‘There was a yonderly look about his eyes’, ‘He’s look’t very yonderly sin’ his woife dee’d’. And if you were far from all yonder, you were mentally ‘not all there’.
yuk out (verb)
Yorkshire
Of ditches: clean out, drag. A farmer had acres of potatoes under water, ‘all because the authorities had not seen that the dykes had been yukked out’. The etymology is obscure, but it probably has a phonetic origin, similar to what we see in jerk. In several parts of the North, yark was used to mean ‘pull something up forcibly by the roots’.