3 Quizzes, Closing Date 30 November 2024
Quizzes & Puzzles0 min ago
Is this a Scottish or English word?
Do YOU use it? Where do you come from?
No best answer has yet been selected by brawburd. Once a best answer has been selected, it will be shown here.
For more on marking an answer as the "Best Answer", please visit our FAQ.Dear Indie, I've had this debate about Oxford dictionaries on AnswerBank before. There are various types of this reference...the Concise...the Shorter...etc. However, there is only one publication which is correctly called 'THE Oxford English Dictionary' and that is the multi-volume one that fills a shelf in reference libraries, looking for all the world like a set of 'Encyclop�dia Britannica'. I'm lucky enough to possess such a thing.
When I quote from 'TOED', that's the one I mean and it alone is considered the ultimate arbiter of British - and very largely, American - word-meaning and etymology.
For 'manky', it says "from mank (adjective). Bad, inferior, defective, dirty." If one looks up 'mank' (adjective), it lists the 'maimed/mangled' ideas I offered above and further suggests probable Old French and Latin (mancus = maimed) sources. However, originally - as far as variants of the English language is concerned - mank was a Scottish usage re Brawburd's question.
Purely as a matter of interest, regarding the use of the word to mean just 'dirty' - as is now standard - the earliest reference is from 1971...that's 'yesterday' in etymological terms.
Dear Marsh, the online 'OED' is, virtually by definition, likely to be the most up-to-date, but - when one is discussing a word with apparent English-language origins in the 16th century, how relevant is "up-to-dateness"? My 2nd Edition (1989) 'OED' says much the same as the online version in any case.
Online says 'origin uncertain' but its very first suggestion as to likely provenance is 'mank + y', which is where I came in, as it were. The earliest quote re the adjective 'mank' is from the Scottish poet, Gavin Douglas. Cheers