Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue – Day Ninety-Four

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

Cropsick

The dictionary defines this as “sickness in the stomach, arising from drunkenness” and is still in some dictionaries today and means something more akin to ‘a surfeit of food and drink’. The word ‘crop’ used to more commonly mean ‘the top of something’, so I’m going with the idea that this phrase evolved from something like headsick, although that’s likely to be a guess which is wrong.

The word has slowly gone out of usage over the last two centuries, but I’m not sure why, it’s quite a ring to it.