Beyond 'The Sniffles': 10 Lost Words for Winter Sickness You'll Wish We Still Used

Winter's here, and with it comes the familiar trio: the cough, the sneeze, and the runny nose. We tend to lump these under the generic banner of a 'cold,' but the English language once had a much richer, more specific vocabulary for the misery of winter ailments. According to Mental Floss, here are 10 wonderfully descriptive words that have fallen out of common use but perfectly capture the nuances of being sick.

For Your Nose and Head

That single, pendulous droplet on the tip of your nose on a cold day has a name: a meldrop. Derived from Old Norse, it originally meant the foam from a horse's mouth but was adopted in 16th-century Scots to describe a drip from an icicle or a nose. And that stuffy, congested feeling in your head? That's a snirl, an 18th-century dialect word for a head cold.

A Symphony of Coughs

Not all coughs are created equal. To kiffle is to cough due to a tickle in your throat. A harsh, scratching cough that won't clear is a fox’s cough, so-called because the animal's call sounds guttural and hoarse. And a violent, convulsive fit of coughing was once known as kink-haust in some dialects. It’s a powerful word for a truly nasty cold.

The State of Being Unwell

A single sneeze is a sternutament, a wonderfully formal 16th-century medical term. For that in-between feeling—not truly sick, but definitely not well—you could say you’re feeling awvish. An 18th-century equivalent was frobly-mobly, meaning 'indifferently well.' And the Old English word for a headache was headwarch, a direct combination of 'head' and 'waerc' (pain).

The modern phenomenon of going to work despite being sick also has an older name. Coined in the 1930s, presenteeism is the direct opposite of absenteeism. Finally, if you're confined to your bed, the restless boredom and general despair you feel is known in psychology as alysm.

PRISM Insight: The rediscovery of these hyper-specific ailment words highlights a modern linguistic trade-off. While we've gained clinical precision with terms like 'upper respiratory infection,' we've lost the nuanced, poetic vocabulary that once described the specific sensory experience of being unwell. This reflects a broader shift in communication, from personal, granular description to standardized diagnosis.