Buzz
As winter approaches, these 10 words for cold-weather maladies will be essential when the harsh conditions take their toll on you.
1. Meldrop
Rooted in Scandinavian origins, meldrop initially referred to a drop of foam from a horse’s mouth as it gnawed on the bit—the metal bar used in a horse's mouth, which was called mel in Old Norse. According to the English Dialect Dictionary, it later came to describe both a drop of water hanging from an icicle and a droplet hanging from the tip of a person's nose in 16th-century Scots.
2. Snirl
Once an obscure term for the nose or the metal hoop used in a bull’s nostrils, snirl (or snurl) was also an old 18th-century word for a blocked-up head cold.
3. Kiffle
To kiffle means to cough due to a tickle in the throat. In contrast, hosk refers to a harsh, painful cough, while boke describes a violent, forceful cough. Wirken is another term for coughing or choking, likely from eating too quickly (a handy word to recall at Christmas dinner). Lastly, a tissick is a dry, irritating cough.
4. Fox’s Cough
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, this refers to a harsh, rasping cough that refuses to go away, named after the fox’s call for its raucous and guttural sound.
5. Sternutament
Sternutation is a 16th-century medical term for the act of sneezing, which makes sternutament a term just as ancient, referring to a single sneeze. The dictionary is full of sneezing-related words: chissup, atissha, and neazle are all forgotten yet wonderfully onomatopoeic terms for sneezes (with neazle especially referring to the sound of a sneeze). The adjective ptarmic describes something that causes sneezing, and even the word sneeze itself is fascinating, as it was originally written as fnese before the initial F was misread as a long S in the 15th century.
6. Awvish
Likely stemming from a mispronunciation of half or half-ish, awvish refers to someone who’s not fully unwell, but isn’t exactly at their best either. A similar term from the 18th century, frobly-mobly or fobly-mobly, defined by lexicographer Francis Grose in his 1839 Glossary of Provincial and Local Words, describes someone feeling “indifferently well.”
7. Presenteeism
The opposite of absenteeism is presenteeism—a term introduced in the early 1930s to describe the act of showing up for work while being unwell.
8. Headwarch
Waerc was an Old English term for pain, sharing its ancient root with work. This gives rise to headwarch, a term for a headache that survived into recent decades in a few northern dialects of England. For something more formal, there's cephalalgy, a word from the early 1600s for a headache. And when the pain becomes intense, the word galea, from Latin for helmet, is used to describe a headache that 'takes in the whole head,' according to a 1706 dictionary.
9. Kink-Haust
As a verb, kink means “to cough convulsively,” while haust (or hoast) refers to a single cough or a tickle in the throat. When combined, the terms form kink-haust (or kinkhost), a dialect word noted in the 19th-century Vocabulary of East Anglia, which referred to a “violent cold and cough” combination.
10. Alysm
Lastly, if any of the above symptoms resonate, consider this rare psychological term: alysm. This term describes the restless boredom or ennui that accompanies being sick or confined to bed, a state of mind discussed in psychology and psychiatry.
