yess n also iss English Dialect Dictionary easse : yes(se) ‘large earthworm’ …
Webster’s Third New Internationl Dictionary eaceworm. Earthworm.
1895 Journal of American Folklore viii, 34 Earthworms are termed yesses.
– Dictionary of Newfoundland English edited by G. M. Story, W. J. Kirwin, and J. D. A. Widdowson.
fret. (1) A frith, or strait of the sea, where the water by confinement is always rough.
(2) Any agitation of liquors by fermentation, confinement, or other cause.
– Johnson’s Dictionary : A Modern Selection by Samuel Johnson (1755), ed. E. L. McAdam and George Milne (1963)
JACKET _ To cover a bum (motherless) lamb with the skin of a dead lamb. Going by smell, the mother of the dead lamb will then nurse the bum lamb.
– Dictionary of the American West by Winfred Blevins.
There is a bird called the YBIS (Ibis) which cleans out its bowels with its own beak. It enjoys eating corpses or snakes’ eggs, and from such things it takes food home for its young, which comes most acceptable. It walks about near the seashore by day and night, looking for little dead fish or other bodies which have been thrown up by the waves. It is afraid to enter the water because it cannot swim.
– The Book of Beasts : Being a Translation from a Latin Bestiary of the Twelfth Century Made and Edited by T. H. White (1954).
Since I ran out of the popular weekly Amalgam poems last week, I will compensate by offering two Archaic Definitions:
quillon One of the two arms that form a sword’s cross-guard, the device that protects the swordsman’s hand.
quoin A wooden edge with a handle at the thick end used to adjust the elevation of a [ship’s] gun.
– A Sea of Words : A Lexicon and Companion for Patrick O’Brian’s Seafaring Tales (Third Edition) by Dean King with John B. Hattendorf and J. Worth Estes.
BUSK. A piece of whalebone or ivory, formerly worn by women, to stiffen the forepart of their stays: hence the toast, ‘both ends of the busk.’
– 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue : A Dictionary of British Slang, University Wit, and Pickpocket Eloquence (unabridged) compiled originally by Captain Grose
igly. See ugsome.
ugsome. horrid, loathsome. Frequent almost to the 17th century; revived by Scott in THE ANTIQUARY (1816): Like an auld dog that trails its useless ugsome carcass into some bush or bracken. … Also ugglesome, uglisome (16th century) … A stronger form of ugly (which Chaucer in THE CLERK’S TALE, 1386, spells igly).
– Dictionary of Early English by Joseph T. Shipley (1955).
vease a run before a leap. The word is often (well, as often as such a word as this can expect) spelled feeze or pheese … A quotation in the OED from 1675 reads “If a man do but goe back a little to take his feeze, he may easily jump over it.”
– Weird And Wonderful Words edited by Erin McKean.
mossyback. A nickname for a draft dodger who evaded military service by seeking refuge in a swamp or similar refuge.
– The Encyclopedia of Civil War Usage by Webb Garrison with Cheryl Garrison.
COCKSWAIN, or COXEN, the officer who manages and steers a boat, and has the command of the boat’s crew. It is evidently compounded of the words cock and swain, the former of which was anciently used for a yawl or small boat, as appears by several authors; but it has now become obsolete, and is never used by our mariners.
– Yon tall anchoring bark
Diminish’d to her cock; her cock a buoy, &c.
SHAKESPEARE..
– Wm. Falconer’s Dictionary of the Marine (1780).
