I'm wondering if there's a word for everything in the Northern-English dialect that's spoken in and around Yorkshire.
I know that there's summat (something), owt (anything), and nowt (nothing), but is there a Northern-English word that follows the same pattern and means everything? (And is generally considered as an equivalent member of this family of constructions?)
I know of no similar word for “everything”. I doubt it exists. Here is the well known (locally at least) Yorkshireman’s motto:
Historic UK
Ear all, see all, say nowt;
Eat all, sup all, pay nowt;
And if ivver tha does owt fer nowt –
Allus do it fer thissen.
Loosely translated, this is:
Hear everything, see everything, say nothing
Eat everything, drink everything, pay nothing
And if ever you do anything for nothing
Always do it for yourself
If there were a word for “everything”, it would surely appear in this caricaturing ditty. It does not, so the likelihood is that no such word is in common use. And I never heard one during my upbringing in deepest Yorkshire.
I often heard all as in constructions such as:
Has tha go’ all’us tha needs?
Meaning
Have you got all (everything) that you need?
(Note: “all” is pronounced with a short “a”, as in “as” rather than in “fall”. Forgive my ignorance of phonetic symbolism.)
I am from Yorkshire and nothing comes to mind, but then again I'm not familiar with older Yorkshire dialects.
We do sometimes use "lot" to mean all/everything/any which is informal but I don't think that it is only used in Northern English(?).
I'll give you three quid for the lot (everything)
I don't like the lot of them (any)
All the moves were terrible, the whole lot of them (all)
source: me
