![]() You can also talk about yestermorn, yester-afternoon, yestereve or yestere’en, yesternight and, should the need ever arise, yestertempest-the last storm. Yesterday and yesteryear aren’t the only yester words in the English language. The yert– part is probably a corruption of “earth,” referring to the downward fall of snow. YertdriftĪ yertdrift is a snow storm accompanied by a very strong wind, which causes the snow to drift. The “bowl” you make cupping your hands together is called a gowpen, and the amount you can hold in it-in other words, a double handful-is a yepsen, or a yepsintle. In 18th-century English, if you were yellow-yowling then you were sickly looking. Yellow-BealĪn old English dialect word for someone who goes fishing, but comes home empty-handed. Although the yellow-back publishing trend didn’t last, the name has remained in use in English to describe any sensationalist, mass-produced, and often poor-quality novel. The books-totaling more than 1000 different titles-were printed and bound in bright mustard-yellow jackets to attract readers’ attention, and were put on sale not in book stores but as impulse buys in tobacconists, train stations, and other everyday locations. In Victorian England, some book publishers began mass-producing cheap, sensationalist novels to compete with the increasingly popular penny-dreadfuls. Supposedly ( according to the Oxford English Dictionary) derived from the surname of some notorious American criminal, a yegg or yeggman was a slang term for a burglar or safebreaker in the early 1900s. Year’s MindĪn old 15th-century word for a memorial. Yay-NayĮighteenth- and 19th-century slang for an empty-headed person-literally someone who can only give “yes” or “no” answers. Yaw-YawĬoined by Charles Dickens in Hard Times, to yaw-yaw is to talk haughtily or affectedly. To shuffle along or walk in an awkward manner. Yarn-ChopperĪ 19th-century nickname for someone who talks verbosely, or a journalist who concocts or sensationalizes their stories. The perfect word from 19th-century slang for a tall, lanky man. To do something yaply is to do it nimbly or agilely. YamĪs a verb, yam can be used to mean “to eat appreciatively.” 8. ![]() YallacrackĪn old Scots English word for a loud noise, or a particularly noisy argument or fight. YakkaĪustralian slang term for hard work, derived from an Aboriginal word. Yagimentĭerived via Yiddish from the German for “year-time,” a yahrzeit is an anniversary observed on the date of a person’s death. It’s also another name for the green woodpecker, which supposedly makes a “yaffling” call. To yaffle is to eat or drink messily, or to talk incoherently. It’s probably derived from yoker, another name for a workhorse. YaagerĪn old word from the far north of Scotland for an especially strong man. But as a Germanic language, English already had a “y” sound, and so Y quickly found a home for itself at the tail end of our alphabet-by the early Middle Ages, it had firmly established itself as the go-to choice of letter for scribes wanting to represented the “y” sound in English, ousting the ancient letter yogh, ȝ, which had until then been used to represent the same sound, from our alphabet.Īs a relative latecomer to the English alphabet, however, Y has never been a particularly common letter: Despite being found in a number of the most frequent words in the language ( by, you, your, they, say), you can still only expect it to account for a little over 1.5 percent of all written language, and roughly the same proportion of the words in a dictionary-including the 40 useful Y-words listed here. To speakers of Romance languages, like French and Spanish, this “y” sound was new, and so the classical origin of the newly imported Y was retained in the letter’s name ( i-grec in French, i-griega in Spanish, ípsilon in Portuguese, and so on). The ancestor of our humble letter Y is the 20th letter of the Greek alphabet, upsilon, which was adopted into the Latin alphabet around 2000 years ago to represent the “y” sound (or the voiced palatal approximant, to give it its proper name) found in some Ancient Greek loanwords.
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