shoat, n., a young weaned pig. Possibly Flemish in origin, the use of the word shoat first appears in the English language in the mid- 15th century. Shoat has the secondary transferred meaning of an idle, worthless person. It is this…
Shoat
Category: hurly-burly
Hurly-burly
hurly-burly, n., Tumult, commotion, strife, uproar, turmoil, confusion (formerly a more dignified word than now). Hurly-burly first appears in the English language by the mid-sixteenth century. While most often found as a noun, it has an adjectival and adverbial form, and, for a…
New Feature
A foray into the indecipherable, neglected, uncommon or forgotten words found in the documents of the Yale Indian Papers Project During the course of transcription, editors are faced with a number of challenges, most of which center…