![]() ![]() If you’re decidophobic, then you hate making decisions. To walk about, or to stray away from home. ![]() Dead-NipĮighteenth-century slang for a failed idea. Dead-HorseĪs a metaphor for something that has ceased to be useful, the term dead horse is today more often than not used in the phrase “beating a dead horse,” meaning “to fruitlessly continue with something all interest has been lost in.” Before then, however, dead-horse was a 17th-century term for work for which you’d been paid in full in advance-and so to work the dead-horse or for a dead horse meant “to busy yourself in work that at the end of which you won’t be paid.” A dead-man, incidentally, is an old English nickname for an empty liquor bottle, so being down among the dead-men meant “passed out drunk on the floor” in 18th-century English. DayligaunĪn old Scots word for twilight, dayligaun literally means “daylight-going.” 14. Also a word for a "A hollow in a surface a depression, furrow, incision," according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Daring-HardyĪ Shakespearean invention meaning “recklessly bold,” or “foolhardy.” 12. DapperwitĪ quick-witted, lively young man. DapperpyeĪn old adjective meaning “variegated” or “multi-colored.” 10. A danglet-literally a “little dangle”-is an icicle. DanglementĪn 18th century word either for a finger, or for a dangling decoration, or trim on a garment. To do something dang-swang is to do it vigorously, or with great energy or enthusiasm. To bounce a baby on your knee is to dandle it. Dandie-ClawĪ dandie-claw is an easily completed task or, when used in the phrase, “to give it the dandie-claw,” it essentially means “that won’t last long,” or “that won’t take long to finish off.” No one is quite sure where the phrase comes from, but it’s possible that a dandy or dandie-claw was originally a small brush used to groom horses, which at some point in time might have become synonymous with a brief or undemanding chore. If you’re daffled, then you’re bewildered or disorientated by a sensory overload. DabsterĪn astute or especially skilled worker. Figuratively, it can be used as a nickname for greasy, lank hair, or for a tall, gangly person. ![]() Daberlickĭaberlick or dabberlack is an old dialect name for long, straggly seaweed. Dab-DumpĪn old Yorkshire dialect word for a pool of water left on the beach after the tide retreats. Nowadays, D is one of the most frequently used letters of our alphabet, accounting for just over 4 percent of a standard page of English text (or one out of every 25 letters), and roughly 2.5 percent of all the words in a standard dictionary-including the 40 delicious D words listed here. Although it too eventually fell out of use, it still survives in modern-day Icelandic. The Old English letter eth (Ð ð), however, effectively went the other way: it was invented in Britain (or perhaps Ireland) after the introduction of the Latin alphabet to England, and is actually a derivative of the Roman letter D. Over time, that hieroglyph became a Phoenician letter, dalet, which then became the Greek letter delta, and finally the Roman letter D, which arrived in England (along with most of the rest of the modern alphabet) from continental Europe more than 1500 years ago.īefore then, English was written using a runic writing system called futhorc, a number of the letters of which- like thorn (Þ þ) and wynn (Ƿ ƿ)-survived into the Old English period before dying out later. It’s thought that the earliest ancestor of our humble letter D was an ancient Egyptian hieroglyph representing a door, which is where D get its hollowed-out shape from. ![]()
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