Buried Alive: The Wonderful Dead Words English Left Behind

Somewhere in the Oxford English Dictionary's archives sits an enormous pile of words that no longer have a home. Words like quemping — complaining in a low, grumbling murmur, the verbal equivalent of a sigh from the next room. Words like jargogle, which meant to jumble or confuse, and which honestly deserves a comeback purely on sound alone.

These aren't obscure curiosities from foreign tongues. They're English. Our English. And they died — not with ceremony, but the way words usually do: people simply stopped saying them.

A Word Dies When a Life Does

That's the thing lexicographers will tell you if you buy them a coffee: words rarely die of natural causes. They die because the thing they described died.

Quemping faded out because the social choreography around grumbling changed. Victorian households had whole vocabularies for low-grade domestic discontent — servants quemped, masters harrumped, and everyone knew which was which. When those households dissolved, the vocabulary dissolved with them.

Other casualties tell similar stories. Snollygoster — a shrewd, unprincipled politician — is enjoying a strange afterlife in American political commentary, but British English has let it slide. Brabble, meaning to quarrel noisily about nothing, describes roughly 40% of any family Christmas, yet nobody reaches for it.

What the Graveyard Says About Us

A dead word is a fossil, and fossils tell you about the ecosystem. The sheer number of obsolete words for rain, mud and drizzle in regional dictionaries — smurr, drizzle-drizzle, scotdrift — maps a nation obsessed with weather and lacking central heating. The cluster of elaborate words for drunkenness that peaked in the Georgian era? Draw your own conclusions about the eighteenth century.

What's striking about the modern graveyard is what isn't in it. We're not losing words for feelings or relationships. We're losing words for physical processes, rural labour, and the specific textures of pre-digital life. The word groak — to watch someone silently while they eat, hoping they'll share — is endangered precisely because so many of us now eat alone, staring at phones.

Can We Still Coin a Classic?

So can the email-and-notification age produce words worth keeping? Lexicographers point out that we absolutely do — it's just that the pipeline has changed. Blert, peng and wasteman arrived through playgrounds and grime music rather than the drawing rooms that once gave us fashionable slang. Modern coinages like doomscrolling or corpsing (in its streaming-era sense) may well be the quempings of 2125.

The difference is speed. Words used to settle over decades. Now a term can be born, peak and become cringe within eighteen months — which makes survival harder. To last, a word needs to describe something that outlives its moment. Grief, weather, tea, and the specific agony of a group email will all still exist in a century. NFTs, probably not.

The Resurrection Challenge

Here's where you come in. The OED's editors can't revive a word — only usage can. So consider this your mission for the week: pick one dead word and deploy it, unironically, in real life.

Our shortlist:

• Jargogle — to confuse. "The new bin schedule has completely jargogled me."
• Quemp — to grumble quietly. Ideal for open-plan offices.
• Groak — to hover hopefully by someone's lunch.
• Fudgel — to pretend to work when you're actually doing nothing. HR need never know.
• Uhtceare — the anxiety of lying awake before dawn. Old English, devastatingly relevant.

Words come back from the dead more often than you'd think. Anorak, banter and bling all had second acts. Language isn't a museum — it's a jumble sale, and everything eventually comes back around.

Tell us which word you're resurrecting. Someone has to be the first person in a hundred years to say jargogle at a bus stop. Why not you?