Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue – Day 188

The Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue was first published at the end of the eighteenth century, and given that the current health crisis is giving too much time to read books, I thought I’d pick a daily word from it until I got bored….

Letch

This is a word that Grose was one of the first to define and he noted it to be “a whim of the amorous kind, out of the common way”. The origins of the word are unknown, but it might be a slight corruption of the word ‘latch’, which is from the Old English ‘læccan’, which is to grasp or take hold of.