New Cumbrian Words

In our Autumn 2024 meeting we had an interesting talk from Neil Hutchinson on Dialect Research in Schools. This included which words were declining, but more positively which words were on the up.

As our main dialect dictionaries were written back in the 19th Century, they predate the modern inventions that we take for granted. So I asked Neil, if he could work with his class on some new Cumbrian words rather than just use standard English. Like the French who decided that l'hovercraft was too English and came up with the more French l'aeroglisseur.

Our President Jean, telt me thut wen teles fust kem oot, fowk called em, 't' gowks lantern'. Literally, 'the fools light', efter feuls sittin gloppen et a laal box wid a leet in it!

Here's what Neil's class came up with. If you have any comments or if you've already use a Cumbrian word for your mobile phone or the airplane that takes you on your holidays, then let me know. Either via email (see page footer), the contact form on the front page, or via Twitter @Workytown . Any gud yans and I'll add them to the list.

Mushell - Vape

Mush for 'face' and chimmel for 'chimney'. We compounded it to mush-chimmel, but then decided to blend into mushell.

Paggish - City

Pagger for 'fight area' and parish for 'town' blended to paggish to mean 'fighting-town' or 'fighting-place' which best sums up a city!

Twapish - Roadman (aggressive male city dweller)

Twat for 'hitting' and the above paggish to mean 'an aggressive man from a city'.

Zookden- Unplanned pregnancy

Zookers for 'surprise' and bairden for 'child or offspring'. Again a blend to 'surprise-child'.

Pether - Drunk gossip

Peeve for 'drunk' and 'gossip' is blether blended to pether.

Cample-peeve - angry drunk

Cample for 'angry' and peeve for 'drunk'.

Fidefort - eye glasses

deek for 'look', effort meaning 'thing' and fizzog for 'face'. All blended meaning 'face-look-things'.

la'l-leckie - phone

la'l for 'little' and leckie for 'electric' so compounded to mean 'small-electrical item'.

Petreff - car

petrol + ratch for 'search' and rive for 'pull', altered in spelling to suit the wordblend.

Kran- kebab

scran for 'food' and kaleyed for 'drunk' so the blend means 'drunk-food'.

Cratch - eavesdropping

craic for 'gossip' and ratch for 'searching' so 'gossip-search'.