bait

Newcastle Road, Sunderland

 

Photo by Mike Pearce

 

Bait

 

Bill Griffiths’ Dictionary of North East Dialect defines bait (sometimes spelled 'bate') as ‘a portable meal’ (2011:6). This seems to be how the word is being used on the side of a mobile food stall in Sunderland.

 

In modern Standard English the word is used to describe food used to lure prey, particularly in the context of fishing. Its origins lie in the Old English noun bát – ‘what can be bitten’ (i.e. ‘food’), which derives from the past tense of bítan (‘bite’). Cognate with bát are the Old Norse nouns beit ('pasturage') and beita ('food'). The link with animal feed is significant, since – as the Oxford English Dictionary records – historical evidence suggests that bait is often used to describe food for domestic animals, particularly horses.

 

What is now generally regarded as the North East sense of bait once had a wider geographical spread. Joseph Wright, in Volume 1 of the English Dialect Dictionary (1898) defines bait as a ‘workman or labourer's meal in the middle of the day’ and cites evidence for its occurrence in this sense in locations as far apart as Northumberland and Sussex.

 

Interestingly, nineteenth-century lexicographical sources record bait- occurring in a number of compounds: Wright gives bait-bag, bait-house, bait-irons, bait-poke, and bait-time. To this list we can now add -box.

 

References

 

Griffiths, B. 2011. A Dictionary of North East Dialect (3rd edition). Alnwick: Northumbria Press.

 

Wright, J. 1898. The English Dialect Dictionary, Vol. I. Oxford: Henry Frowde.

 

Oxford English Dictionary Online.

 

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