A Glossary of Words used in the Country of Wiltshire — A Reader’s Guide

From Pickaxe to Pig-muddle: The Range of Entries

The glossary covers tools (peck for pickaxe, pick for fork), plants (pig-nut, pickpocket for shepherd's purse), and everyday objects (peel for a lace-making pillow or oven peel). But it also includes abstract terms: pelt for rage, peter grievous for a dismal person. The compilers often give multiple senses for a single word, as with peart (five meanings) or picked (sharp-pointed or looking ill). This layering suggests that dialect words carried nuanced, context-dependent meanings in daily use.

Quotations and Literary Echoes

Many entries are supported by quotations from local speech or published works. For pelt, the glossary cites Herrick's Oberon's Palace and a line from the novel Dark: “You zims 'mazin afeert to zee your gran'fer in a pelt!” The entry for peter grievous similarly draws on Dark and notes a variant, pity grievous, at Clyffe Pypard. These citations anchor the words in both literary tradition and living conversation, showing how the compilers wove together written and oral evidence.

Geographical Markers and County Variation

Each entry is tagged with a region code—N.W., S.W., N. & S.W.—revealing that Wiltshire dialect was not uniform. For instance, peck (stumble) is marked N.W., while peart (lively) is N.W. but other senses are S.W. or N. & S.W. The compilers also note when a word appears in other counties: pigeon-pair is compared to a North English phrase “a dow's cleckin.” These annotations turn the glossary into a map of linguistic distribution, hinting at how words travelled or stayed local.

Stories and Appendices Beyond the Word List

The preface mentions that the volume includes “a few short stories, illustrating the dialect as actually spoken,” plus an introduction on pronunciation and appendices on various matters. This framing suggests the glossary is not a bare list but a cultural record. The compilers aimed to preserve not just words but the contexts in which they were used—hence the inclusion of folk-talk examples and the effort to trace etymologies and literary allusions. The work was originally serialized in the Wilts Archæological Magazine before being revised and expanded for book publication.

Readers approaching this glossary will find it rewards browsing as much as lookup. The entries are dense with cross-references and regional notes, and the quotations bring the words to life. Because the compilers drew on both published sources and fieldwork, the volume offers a layered view of late-nineteenth-century Wiltshire speech—its tools, its emotions, its plants, and its people.

That rainy afternoon, I kept returning to how Wiltshire farmworkers named a storm-bent elm a "shrump," as if the landscape itself possessed a vocabulary for weariness. It made me think of all the quiet, uncollected languages we lose — time passing, grass flattening. Later, almost by accident, the old Spalding's Official Baseball Guide - 1913 — Themes and Context landed on the table, and I found the same tenderness there, in how they documented the grunts and shuffles of a game nobody thought needed recording.