Word of the day: gormless

From Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847):

“I’ve tied his tongue,” observed Heathcliff. “He’ll not venture a single syllable all the time! Nelly, you recollect me at his age — nay, some years younger. Did I ever look so stupid, so ‘gaumless,’ as Joseph calls it?”

Joseph, you may recall, is a sour, pious servant at Wuthering Heights. He speaks a Yorkshire dialect — thus gaumless, or gormless.

The Oxford English Dictionary explains gormless as the union of the dialect word gaum, for gome, “notice, understanding,” and the suffix -less. To be gormless is to be “wanting sense, or discernment.” The dictionary’s first citation is given as ?1746. The question from Wuthering Heights comes second, followed by citations from 1861, 1881, 1883, and so on. It seems reasonable to speculate that Brontë’s novel led to more frequent use of the word. This Google Ngram shows use beginning to rise in 1854. Gaumless started to rise in 1853. Granted, the various editions of Brontë’s novel in Google Books might account for those initial spikes. The steep drop from 2011 to 2012 for both words is probably best explained by a lack of scanned books.

I always think of gormless and followed by wonder — the kind of insult people toss around in old movies. No gormless wonders in the OED though.