Contested Etymologies in the Dictionary of the Rev W W Skeat

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Thus to huddle is to hide closely, to crowd together for protection, to crowd into a place of shelter." This is a most unsatisfactory explanation, as there is nothing in the notion of a huddle that has anything to do with either hiding or shelter. Huddle is simply heap, corresponding to the W. Flanders huttel, a bunch or tuft. " Dat gras schiet hier en daar op in huttels:" the grass shoots up here and there in tufts. " In een huttelken vallen : " to fall in a heap, to faint away. In the same dialect we have the simple hut, a bunch, tuft of leaves, of flowers, and fig. something in the sense of E. huddle: " Het is een hut:" it is a mess, it is a bad job. Thus we are brought to the Shropshire hud, to gather into heaps ; Somerset, huddel, a heap.?Halliwell. The appropriateness of the figure of a bunch or heap