mickle / muckle

[prettygoodword]

mickle / muckle - adj., great, large, many. n., a large number of.


As noun, often used with "of" -- a mickle of nickles. These seem to be dialectical variations of the same word, both derived from "much" -- this despite mickle being the more common of the two and some dictionaries list divergent etymologies, though there's always a root form of much in there somewhere. In any case, used mainly in Scotland, north England, and apparently Ireland.

Now if I could only figure out whether "many a mickle mak's a muckle" was a joke by Flanders & Swann or proverbial being quoted by them.

---L.

Comments

[pdlloyd.livejournal.com]

No mention of its use in Wales? *wishing I had access to OED* Hmm, Google turns up Ask Oxford: Free online dictionary resources from Oxford University; I will have to try this out.

[prettygoodword.livejournal.com]

Doesn't seen to extend into the south, no. Good find on the Compact OED resource, though, explaining the quote.

---L.

[pdlloyd.livejournal.com]

I'm just remembering a cassette tape I used to have of folk tales from the Orkney isles (I think, somewhere North of Scotland, anyway) which has a story with a "great, muckle, stewer worm" (all spelling semi-phonetic), in which the word muckle seems to mean very, very large. As in, big enough to swallow a human.

[pdlloyd.livejournal.com]

Okay, the Ask Oxford definition of mickle doesn't give the full info that the OED does, but it's does include the "very large" definition.