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Three Antiquated Words We Need to Bring Back
Frowsy, overmorrow and sennight
Frowsy
The Victorians had a great vernacular and one word that pops up a lot in literature from the era is ‘frowsy’. Sometimes spelt ‘frowzy’, this adjective describes something which is scruffy and unkempt. A good example comes from Mary E. Mann’s 1908 novel, ‘A Sheaf of Corn’:
“She had let fall a bunch of flowers from her frowsy dress upon the pulpit desk and had left them there.”
While frowsy does still appear in modern dictionaries, it seems to have fallen out of favour lately — let’s reverse this trend! It’s thought to derive from the now-obsolete ‘frowsty’, meaning a stale and musty smell. Thinking about it, we should bring frowsty back too.
How to pronounce it: frow-zee
Overmorrow
“The day after tomorrow” — it’s just so cumbersome, isn’t it? If only there were one word that could express the same sentiment. Oh, wait, there is! Enter ‘overmorrow’. Marked as archaic in the Oxford English Dictionary, overmorrow says the day after tomorrow in three fewer words. What’s not to love?
“It comes round on the overmorrow, then why we are…
