quilter

As part of a talk I gave on the history of Australian slang I pointed out the words we had borrowed from British dialects, all emerging from the melting pot process of colonial society where people who had gravitated to London from all over Britain were then transported to the convict settlement.  This meant we had a mad mix of dialectal words that became mainstream in the evolving Australian variety of English.  Sometimes these words were kept within families, passed down from one generation to the next without ever entering into general use.

At the end of my talk  one participant offered quilter as an example.  His father had used it to refer to a woman of ample proportions.  I had never heard of quilter but I found it in the English Dialect Dictionary with the meaning ‘anyone or anything very large: a “whopper”’.  It listed Worcestershire, Warwickshire and Oxfordshire as dialects which had this word, and linked it to the verb to quilt which meant ‘to swallow, especially to swallow a large amount at one gulp’. The rabbit pictured above could have been described in Worcestershire as a quilter.

The OED added a discussion of the etymology which they had to conclude was unknown, although there was quite a lot of evidence of similar words in many Germanic languages with meanings related to swallowing. But nothing conclusive.

So quilter was indeed the perfect example of a dialectal word which had survived in a family although never entering into general use.