Old word: squitch

Popping up on eBay, an old letter of compliant from the days when there were hay-dealers in Shelton, which enshrines the old agricultural word ‘Squitch’. Meaning couch grass.

Squitch. Triticum repens, L. (Lichfield [mid Staffordshire]) — iv. 415. Triticum repens, L., and Agrostis vulgaris, L. Worc[estershire]. —xvii. 38. Also Scutch.” (from Old Country and Farming Words (1880).

Evidently a word known in mid Staffordshire and Worcestershire in the 1870s, and still to be understood in Warrington and Stoke in 1932.

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