Yesterday my wife, who's from Norfolk in the UK, was talking about words she still uses that are common to people in Norfolk, but not elsewhere. One of these was wamps, another word for feet. (It's pronounced in the same way as lamps.) One might say, Get your great wamps off the table, or You're dirtying my clean floor with your muddy wamps. We tried to find the word on Google, but there was no sign of it.
That led to me write to David Crystal, who's produced a number of books on the English language, including at least one on dialect words from around the UK called The Disappearing Dictionary. It has that name because many of the words in the 'dictionary' are beginning to fade out of usage.
David didn't know the word and said he'd looked it up in Joseph Wright's English Dialect Dictionary, which runs to six volumes. A digital version can be found here. Unfortunately Mr Wright didn't include it in his book either, and now it appears the only ones who know the word are a scattering of Norfolk-born people.
Never having come across Wright's dictionary, I clicked on the link, and, as you do, put in my name, since it's English in origin. There are two tiny towns in the UK called by that name - though their spelling is Crowle in each case. [Check out this travel blog which I wrote in 2007, and enter Crowle in the search box to find the references to it.]
We as a family had always believed that the meaning of Crowl is a curl in a river - in other words, a bend in a river. Where we picked that up from I no longer remember, but it's been the general view for many years.
However, Mr Wright has other ideas. He claims its prime meaning is a dwarf; a stunted, deformed person or child. The word has a number of variations in the spelling, of course.
He also claims it means to crawl, or creep. In the US it seems that a number of people mix the sound of crawl and crowl, and if you put crowl into Google, you'll get all sorts of people using the word crowl when they mean crawl, or crowling when they mean crawling. Check out this blog post on the subject.
In a third meaning, Wright says that the plural of crowl, that is crowls, means dirt in the wrinkles of your hand. Whoever would have thought there was a word for this?
Wright goes on to give meanings for words connected to crowl which I won't trouble you with here. You'll find them if you start with crowl in the online dictionary.
Anyway, none of this side path stuff gives us any help with our original word, wamps. My wife is going to post on the Facebook North Norfolk site, and see if anyone else knows the word. Certainly it's well-known in her own family.
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| Dwarf - or Crowl - by BrokenMachine86 |
Update 27.4.23. David Crystal came back to me this morning in an email saying: According to the Dictionary of British Surnames, there are two contenders for your surname's origin. One is from the Anglo-Norman surname de Crul; the other is a metathesised form of curl, 'curly-haired'. It might refer to a topographical feature, such as a river bend. ((Metathesis is the transposition of sounds or syllables in a word or of words in a sentence.)
