It was also once used to refer to holes in watchtowers used by lookouts and guards, or to openings left in the walls of church towers to amplify the sounds of the bells.
DreamholeĪ dreamhole is a small slit or opening made in the wall of a building to let in sunlight or fresh air. Their name is apparently an imitation of their alarm call. Standing little more than a foot tall at the shoulder, the dik-dik is one of the smallest antelopes in all of Africa.
The origin of its name is a mystery, but one theory claims the beetles are so characteristically aggressive that they can be made to fight one another like cockerels. The cockchafer is a large beetle native to Europe and western Asia. In any case, it’s derived from coque, the French word for a seashell. Cock-bellĪ cock-bell can be a small handbell, a type of wildflower that grows in the spring, and an old English dialect word for an icicle. CockapertĬockapert is an Elizabethan name for "a saucy fellow" according to the Oxford English Dictionary, but it can also be used as an adjective meaning "impudent" or "smart-alecky." 12. ClatterfartĪccording to a Tudor dictionary published in 1552, a clatterfart is someone who "wyl disclose anye light secreate"-in other words, it’s a gossip or blabbermouth. When listed on Indian menus, it goes by the slightly more appetizing name of “Bombay duck.” 10. Like the aholehole, the bummalo is another tropical fish, in this case a southeast Asian lizardfish. A bumfiddler is someone who does precisely that. To bumfiddle means to pollute or spoil something, in particular by scribbling or drawing on a document to make it invalid. In his Dictionary of the English Language (1755), Samuel Johnson described a bum-bailiff as "a bailiff of the meanest kind," and in particular, "one that is employed in arrests." 8. BoobyallaĪs well as being the name of a former shipping port in northern Tasmania, boobyalla is also an Aborigine name for the wattlebird, one of a family of honeyeaters native to much of Australia. Bastinadoĭerived from bastón, the Spanish word for a cane or walking stick, bastinado is an old 16th century word for a thrashing or caning, especially on the soles of the feet. It can also be used as a verb meaning "to deforest," or preparing wooded land for farming. AssartĪssart is an old medieval English legal term for an area of forested land that has been converted into arable land for growing crops. By "spreading their legs, and so stretching the largeness of their skins," he wrote, "they have been seen to fly 30 or 40 yards." Assapanick is another name for the flying squirrel. While exploring the coast of Virginia in 1606, Captain John Smith (of Pocahontas fame) wrote in his journal of a creature known to local tribes as the assapanick. The final – ite, incidentally, is the same mineralogical suffix as in words like graphite and kryptonite. It takes its name from the village of Aktash in eastern Russia, where it was first discovered in 1968. AktashiteĪktashite is a rare mineral used commercially as an ore of arsenic, copper, and mercury. Aholehole is pronounced “ah-holy-holy,” and is the name of a species of Hawaiian flagtail fish native to the central Pacific. If you read that as "a-hole," then think again. Here are 50 words that might sound rude, but really aren’t. Some words really do sound like they mean something quite different from their otherwise entirely innocent definition (a mukluk is an Inuit sealskin boot, in case you were wondering), and no matter how clean-minded you might be, it’s hard not to raise an eyebrow or a wry smile whenever someone says something like cockchafer or sexangle. To paraphrase Krusty the Clown, comedy isn’t dirty words-it’s words that sound dirty, like mukluk.