daberlick (noun)
Scotland
A mildly insulting way of talking about someone who is tall and skinny. From Banffshire: ‘Here’s that daberlick o’ a chiel [child].’ The word was also used for long stringy seaweed, for ragged clothing, and for hair that hangs down in tangled and separate locks. It could be a quite useful word these days, with torn jeans so fashionable.
daggy (adjective)
Cumberland, Durham, Lancashire, Norfolk, Northumberland, Scotland, Suffolk, Yorkshire
Wet, drizzly, misty. From Cumberland: ‘The weather is turn’d monstrous daggy’. It’s one of a group of words of similar meaning: daggly, dagging, dagged. They all come from dag, ‘drizzle’, which is related to dew. Variants were found all over the country.
danglements (noun)
Yorkshire
The hanging appendages of a garment, fringes, tassels. ‘She thought the ladies had too many danglements’. As with many uses of the verb dangle, there’s a nuance of untidiness and disapproval.
darricky (adjective)
Gloucestershire
Rotten, decayed. Rotten timber, for example, would be described as darricky. The origin is unclear, but there’s an echo of rickety here, which is an application to objects of the instability associated with the bone-weakness caused by rickets.
dateless (adjective)
Cheshire, Derbyshire, Lancashire, Lincolnshire, Westmorland, Yorkshire
Having the faculties failing through age or suffering. ‘Mother is gone dateless wi’ sorrow’, says Sylvia in Chapter 28 of Mrs Gaskell’s Sylvia’s Lovers (1863). The word could also be used to describe someone unconscious, as from a blow. From Lancashire: ‘They laid her upo’ th’ couch cheer [chair], as dateless as a stone’.
deceivery (noun)
Scotland
A habit or course of deceit. It’s much more than describing a single instance of being deceitful. Deceivery captures the nuance that someone is a habitual deceiver. The -ery ending here, rather unusually, expresses ‘a characteristic state of being’, seen also in knavery. There’s an old Renfrewshire rhyme: ‘He’s free o’ deceivery, the basest o’ knavery’.
deepooperit (adjective)
Scotland
Applied to someone in a state of imbecility, mentally or physically; worn out. ‘A very common expression as applied to bodily frailty’, says an observer from the Shetland Isles. Its potential usefulness extends well beyond those islands. I regularly feel deepooperit.
densh (adjective)
Cumberland, Durham, Northumberland, Yorkshire
Dainty, fastidious, squeamish. The etymology is unclear, but may be related to ‘Danish’: in Norfolk and Lincolnshire the hooded crow, which was thought to come from Denmark, was called a denshman. Densh was evidently used quite a lot in compounds, such as densh-stomached for someone with a fastidious taste or appetite. But my favourite derivation is the description of someone with an affected manner of speaking: densh-gobbed.
derrum (noun)
Yorkshire
A deafening noise; a confusion of sounds. It’s the associated description by one of Joseph Wright’s dialect consultants that captures the imagination: it is like ‘the rumbling, creaks, and cracks of an old mangle, together with the talk of several people who are putting it to use’.
dimracker (noun)
Worcestershire
A disaster; a complete failure. From the south-east of the county: ‘If we gets no more rain this April than us did last, it’ll be a dimracker o’ they gooseberries’. It sounds like a popular phonetic adaptation of disaster.
discomfrontle (verb)
Norfolk, Northamptonshire, Suffolk
To disarrange, discompose. If you’re discomfrontled, your normal state of mind or body has been seriously disturbed. It seems to be a blend of several negative feelings – discomfit, affront, or confront, with echoes of discomfort and discomfortable. You’re definitely upset.
dixie-fixie (noun)
Scotland
A state of confinement, usually in prison. Dixie was a word meaning a sharp chiding. It probably comes from the time when Latin was spoken in schools, and a teacher would end an observation with dixi – ‘I have said it’ – meaning he wasn’t prepared to tolerate any further response from his class. It would have been a short semantic step from here to a magistrate sending someone down.
doaty (verb)
Devon, Somerset
To nod the head when dozing in a sitting position. An Exmouth magazine in 1810 talks of someone ‘doatee in the chimley coander’ [in the chimney corner]. Anyone listening to an unexciting lecture would have no trouble seeing the modern relevance of this word.
docity see odocity
doggery-baw (noun)
Lincolnshire
Nonsense. ‘Don’t argle with him, he talks such doggery-baw’. Doggery, meaning ‘doglike behaviour’, has had a wide range of uses since at least the sixteenth century, with its earliest recorded usage meaning ‘abusive language’. To ‘speak doggery’ was to be rude and insulting.
doppet (verb)
Gloucestershire
To play a musical instrument jerkily. As I write this, a lad has been doppeting on an amplified guitar in a house some distance away, on an otherwise peaceful Sunday afternoon. There might be an etymological link with dope, but I suspect his closer neighbours are thinking of a stronger word.
dottled (adjective)
Lincolnshire, Scotland
Said of anyone acting in a silly, foolish, or confused way. ‘If I hadn’t been so dottled I’d’ve thought of that!’ The word was especially used to talk about someone apparently in a state of dotage. ‘The poor chap’s gone quite dottled.’ A dottle-trot described an old man walking along in quick, short steps.
dowpy (adjective)
Northumberland
Of a pregnant woman: having a rounded shape. The origin lies in an Old Norse word for a rounded cavity which arrived in English during the Middle Ages as doup. Over the years it came to be used all over the North of England (and also in Scotland and Ireland) for a variety of shapes – the end of an egg, a burned-down candle, a nose, a person’s posterior . . . and (perhaps most usefully, for it is a shape that lacks good descriptors) the pregnant form.
drang (noun)
Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Gloucestershire, Hampshire, Isle of Wight, Somerset, Wales, Wiltshire
A narrow passage or lane between two walls, hedges, etc. The vowel varies greatly – sometimes drong, dreng, dring, drung – but in some form it was noted all over the West Country during the nineteenth century, along with drangway. It was sometimes also used for an open ditch or drain. In all cases, the common element is narrowness, and the notion of pressure – people passing through a narrow space – explains an etymological link with throng.
drowk (verb)
Huntingdonshire, Northamptonshire
Of plants: to wilt from want of water. The origin is unclear, though there’s clearly an echo of droop. It was a favourite word of the poet John Clare: ‘Drowking lies the meadow-sweet, / Flopping down beneath one’s feet’ (1820).
drunketting (adjective)
Berkshire
Given to getting drunk. ‘Thee girt drunkettin’ fool, come home with me direckly minnit [this minute]’. The nuance of predisposition differentiates it from other derivatives in this field, such as drunkensome and drunky, where the person is already (as they used to say in Lincolnshire) ‘drunk as a boiled owl’.
dryth (noun)
Berkshire, Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Gloucestershire, Hampshire, Isle of Wight, Kent, Pembrokeshire, Somerset, Surrey, Sussex
Dryness, drought, dry air. We have warmth, coolth, length, depth, breadth . . . so why not dryth? It was widely used across the South of England. From Sussex, a proverb: ‘Drythe never yet bred dearth’. It even developed some extended meanings, such as ‘thirst’. But it never caught on in standard English. Shame.
dumbfounder (verb)
Berkshire, Devon, Hampshire, Northamptonshire, Scotland, Sussex, Warwickshire, Yorkshire
Confuse, stupefy, stun. Dumbfound is such an expressive verb it’s surprising the derivative forms didn’t enter standard English. Examples from widely separated dialects suggest it was being used everywhere in Britain, along with an adverb, dumbfounderedly, two adjectives, dumbfoundered and dumbfoundering, and a noun, dumbfounderment.
dwam (noun)
Cornwall, Cumberland, Devon, Durham, Gloucestershire, Ireland, Lancashire, Northumberland, Scotland, Yorkshire
A swoon, faint, sudden feeling of faintness. The vowel is long, as shown by numerous variant spellings, such as dwalm, dwarm, and dwaum. From Lothian in 1895: ‘Me gang to the kirk! No likely! The verra thocht o’t brings a dwam ower me’. The word was mainly found throughout Scotland and the North of England, but it was also recorded in the English south-west, and in Ireland too. It generated a family of derived words – you might be troubled with dwaminess or feel dwamish or dwamy.