An interesting word I hadn’t encountered before. In parts of Tunstall, people call their rear alleyways “ginnels”, according to a local newspaper report today on fencing these to keep druggies out.

The word ginnel appears to come originally from Yorkshire, according to 19th century sources. Though one early Lancashire dialect book also found it there. There was speculation that it may perhaps go back to the Anglo-Saxon gin, a narrow channel, open. Similar, I would suggest, to the Old Norse gin, meaning mouth, open. Given the Yorkshire core of usage it may well come from Norse rather than Anglo-Saxon. Although Anglo-Saxon gynian was ‘to yawn’, so there were evidently close similarities between the two.

An early memoir gives it as “goonhole”, presumably as an onomatopoeia (writing down a word as it sounds), which would seem a strangely congruent folk-twist on Old Norse ‘open mouth’. If such it was.

Dialect studies now also note it being found in Manchester and across larger towns of the East Midlands, used to refer to back-alleys. And evidently now also in Tunstall, Stoke-on-Trent. Today it seems it can also be applied to un-walled paved “footways between strips of land” between estate houses (e.g. such as the ones which criss-cross the Bentilee estate in Stoke, though I’ve no idea what residents there call these).