A Glossary of Provincial Words & Phrases in Use in Somersetshire

A glossary that functions as a linguistic memorial to a way of speaking now almost entirely silenced. Compiled in 1842 by Wadham Pigott Williams and commissioned by the Somersetshire Archaeological Society, this book preserves thousands of provincial words and phrases that were already vanishing under the pressures of standardized education and the printing press. The entries range from the practical to the poetic: words for agricultural tools long since mechanized, folklore terms for weather phenomena, expressions of grief and joy that belonged to a slower world. R.C.A. Prior's introduction traces how Somerset's dialect carries the fingerprints of its demographic history, the influences that shaped it across centuries. What emerges is not merely a reference work but an act of linguistic rescue, a desperate attempt to pin down words that existed primarily in speech before they dissolved entirely. For anyone curious about how English sounded in the villages of England before mass education homogenized the tongue, these pages offer an extraordinary window.