The Miserable Word History of Milligrubs

Hello,

Today, on the 20th day of my Mystery Words Month, the word is milligrubs and it is accidentally very appropriate as today is also Blue Monday (invented to sell holidays by a travel agent, but associated with being a despondent day in the calendar and now used to sell articles about mental health).

This word can be spelled as milligrubs, mullygrubs, or mollygrubs and is defined by the American-English Merriam Webster dictionary as “a despondent, sullen, or ill-tempered mood”. I tend towards the milligrubs during January, hence my Mystery Words Month as something for a bit of fun. I’m posting a word a day on my social media (twitter, facebook, bluesky) with a brief etymology.

Webster’s reckon milligrubs is a variation of an earlier word mulliegrums which itself was probably formed thanks to the obsolete English word mully (dusty or mouldy) paired with megrims.

If you read older classic novels you may have encountered the idea of a megrim. Nowadays you’d say you have a headache or migraine (with thanks to Old French migraine, Latin hemicrania, pain in one side of the head) and ultimately from Greek hemikrania (hemi meaning half and kranion being a skull).

We don’t really talk about megrims anymore but in the 1800s the term was also used for depression and low spirits, which comes back neatly to the milligrubs – a word whose first use according the Oxford English dictionary was by a Tudor-era playwright and poet, Thomas Nashe in the late 1500s.

Whatever the exact origin of milligrubs I think we can all agree that we should avoid them wherever possible. Anything that dusty, mouldy, and painful is not a good thing.

Until next time happy reading, writing, and wordfooling,

Grace (@Wordfoolery)

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