summat

1. 1
   pronoundialectalEnglandYorkshire

   Some thing that is not specified or named; an indefinite thing referred to in a general way.

   He muttered that summat had gone badly wrong at the mill that morning.

   She always kept summat by for hard times, a habit from leaner years.

   Similarsomething

   Oppositenothing

   Note

   Northern England's spoken form of "something," heard especially in Lancashire and Yorkshire. It began as a dialect variant of somewhat, recorded from the 18th century. Joseph Wright, in A Grammar of the Dialect of Windhill, suggested it might instead be a contraction of "some that." Novelists use it to give characters a regional voice, as George Eliot does in Adam Bede (1859). In ordinary prose it reads as informal and local.

2. 2
   adverbdialectalEnglandYorkshire

   To some extent or degree; partly but not entirely.

   He reckoned the weather had turned summat colder since the morning.

   The new lad seemed summat shy when the strangers came round.

   Similarsomewhat, rather, slightly

   Note

   Here the word stays closest to its source, the somewhat behind the pronoun "something". It sits before an adjective to soften it, as in summat colder or summat shy, and it cannot itself be graded: there is no "more summat." George Eliot's Adam Bede (1859) also has the hyphenated summat-like in a character's speech. Like the pronoun, it belongs to informal Lancashire and Yorkshire talk.

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