• collywobbles •
Printable Version Pronunciation: kah-li-wah-bêlz • Hear it!
Part of Speech: Noun, plural
Meaning: Queasiness caused by anxiety, fear, or anticipation; butterflies in the stomach.
Notes: Collywobbles is out there pretty much on its own, without any derivational relatives. It currently requires a plural verb (collywobbles are) although in the past it has been used in the singular to refer to actual stomach pain.
In Play: Now we have a name for those butterflies we get in our stomach that are let in by anxiety: "Gosh, just looking at Sue St. Marie gives me the collywobbles." Sometimes this word simply refers to the anxiety itself: "My granddaughter got the collywobbles when she saw Santa Claus at the mall and never did tell him what she wanted for Christmas."
Word History: Today's Good Word is a compound made up of colic + wobble + -s, a suffix associated with ailments (measles, mumps, blues). Colic was borrowed from Old French colique, the remnant of Latin colica (passio) "colonic (suffering)", feminine of colicus "of the colon". Colicus came from kolikos, the Greek adjective from kolon "colon". Wobble is an authentic English word, inherited from a Germanic family of words that includes web, waffle and weave.
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