Calling all wassucks: hunt on for England's lost words
Wassucks, ommucks and drangways -- where are they now? A dictionary publisher is trying to find out in a quest to trace English dialect words which have faded from use.
Collins is trying to work out when such regional words died out in England -- and whether anyone is still saying them.
Wassuck, meaning a waste of space, and ommuck, meaning a sandwich, are both from the Black Country, the urban area west of Birmingham in central England. A drangway means a narrow lane in the dialect of Devon, in southwest England.
Any words found to be still in existence will be added to the Collins Corpus, their word database used to compile the Collins dictionary.
"As we have become more and more mobile, both socially and geographically, so local dialect words associated with particular places have been losing out to words with a wider currency," said David Britain, from the department of language and linguistics at the University of Essex.
"This is especially true of many rural areas that have experienced high levels of in-migration from nearby cities over the past half-century.
"Although new words are being coined all the time, many of these older traditional dialect words may soon be gone forever."
Collins unveiled a list of two dozen words believed to have died out in the last 30 years.
Elaine Higgleton, from Collins, said: "One of the problems with local dialect words is that even where they are spoken, they tend not to penetrate written language -- both online and in print -- which makes their usage very hard to monitor."
The survey covers seven dialect regions around England: Devon, Northumbria, Norfolk, East Yorkshire, the Black Country, Lancashire and Lincolnshire.
Among the words Collins is trying to trace are kickshaw (an amusement) from Devon; puckaterry (muddle), blar (cry) and brawk (burp) from Norfolk, eastern England; and hippetyclinch (limp) and bari (pretty) from Northumbria, northeast England.
Others include parzle (stroll) and galasses (braces) from East Yorkshire, northern England; wambly (faint, sick), fratching (to quarrel) and dree (monotonous) from Lancashire, northwest England; plus squaddy (muddy) and roily (stomach upset) from Lincolnshire, eastern England.
