Huddersfield Dialect

A New Glossary of the Dialect of the Huddersfield District

Written by Walter Edward Haigh (1856-1931) and published in 1928 by O xford University Press.The book is notable for containing a foreword by Professor ].R.R. Tolkien. A 2007 article by Janet Brennan Croft noted that a number of words in Tolkien’s later fiction could be traced to Haigh’s glossary, including Baggins, Bree, Brockenborings, gaffer, nowt, nosey, nuncle, and vittles.

This work was digitised for the Huddersfield Exposed web site in June 2017:
https://huddersfield.exposed/p/97a

The Author

Walter Edward Haigh was a writer, academic, and lecturer. He was born in Honley in 1856, the son of farmer, butcher and innkeeper Walter Haigh and his wife Martha. During the 1880s and early 1890s, he worked as an elementary school teacher in Wolverley, Kidderminster. By 1901, he had returned to Yorkshire and was residing at 2 Hanson Lane, Lockwood, where the Census showed him sharing a house with his 34-year-old niece, Martha Ellen Haigh. He married Ethel Hirst in 1905 and they moved to 13 Wormald Street, Almondbury. He was the Head of the English & History Department at Huddersfield Technical College from 1890 to 1918. Following his retirement, he became the Emeritus Lecturer in English until his death. He died on 24 January 1931, aged 74, and was buried on 27 January at St. Mary’s Church, Honley.

Copyright Status

The author of this work, Walter Edward Haigh, died in 1931. Under the terms of the Copyright Act 1911, copyright expired his works at the end of 1981. The foreword by Prof. ].R.R. Tolkien likely remains under copyright until 1 January 2044 and is therefore not included in this PDF.

The Huddersfield Exposed web site asserts no copyright over this digitised version of the book and it is released under a CC0 Public Domain Dedication.