Defining Words Trivia Quiz

Answer: a disease

When used as a noun, farcy is a disease of animals, usually but not always of horses. It has similar symptoms to glanders. It was first used in the late 15th century in Britain.

If used as a verb, farcy means to stuff.

Answer: part of the small intestine

From the definitions of ileum I've given here, it is a part of the small intestine. The Oxford English Dictionary suggests it is 'the third portion of the small intestine'.

The spelling "ilium" refers to a small bone in the human body.

Answer: a tube to measure the speed of liquids, airflow, etc.

The word pitot is first recorded as being used in 1852 by Monsieur D'Aubuisson de Voissins in his 'Treatise Hydraul'.

A pitot tube is widely used in aircraft as part of their measurement components. It is a geometrically shaped open ended tube with the open face pointing against the flow of the fluid.

Answer: homespun woollen cloth

Hodden was a hard wearing staple garment of the early middle ages. It was a hand woven coarse woollen cloth which was widely produced by crofters in Scotland and elsewhere.

You may be interested to learn that the colour hodden grey (which appears often in the poetry of Robbie Burns) was created not by dyeing but by mixing the wool of one black fleece and twelve white fleeces.

Answer: a Spanish word meaning fox

Zorro was not a masked adventurer but originally a word derived from Spanish used to describe foxes, and the fox-like wolves which the early Spanish explorers encountered in the Americas.

Answer: a flannel undervest or nightdress

A wylie-coat was an ubiquitous woollen garment widely worn by the working classes of the late 15th century England and Wales.

The first written record of the word appeared at that time in England where it was used to describe an under-waistcoat woven from wool.

Normally, it would have been worn under a doublet.

There is a lot of evidence to show the ambient temperatures in those days were a lot lower than nowadays and thicker clothing was essential.

Answer: a nightingale from Asia

This is a bird, a type of thrush, which belonged to the species known as Pycnonotus.

Apparently, it was admired for its song and was often called the 'nightingale' of the East.

Answer: a knot or spur in a piece of wood

A knag is a pointed, sometimes sharp protuberance that occasionally grows from a tree or branch. Over time its meaning evolved to come to mean a hook or peg driven into a door or wall on which clothes might be hung.

The first documented appearance of the word in English literature was about 1440 in a poem about Sir Gowghter featured in Utterson's 'Early Poetry'.

Answer: a surgeon's instrument for scraping bone

There was a reference to 'xyster' in the 1684 translation of Blancard's 'Physician's Dictionary'. The xyster was a scraping device used by the surgeons of that time.

Answer: an agricultural settlement in Israel

In Israel a moshav was a village or settlement consisting of agricultural smallholdings worked partly on a cooperative and partly on an individual basis. They were a sort of amalgam of land owned by individuals and by communities.