I’m pretty sure it started in The Hobbit, but definitely LOTR:
Halfling.- Apparently it is an old scots word for ‘awkward teenager’, so I can see where JRR conflated that through ‘half boy - half man’ to ‘small person’.
Probably about half the words on your list were already familiar to me, but I got to the Hobbit at a dreadfully late age (17ish) and I’d read masses of brit lit (thanks granddad!) before starting it. Porter, tuppence, turnkey, mattocks, slowcoach are all in ‘Wind in the Willows’ and in ‘Kidnapped’ they often sleep on bracken. Palpitating? Any ‘decent’ bodice ripper with have the heroine palpitating (torn between terror and desire, usually).
If you want more interesting and seldom used words, try googling Edward Lear. Lovely stuff, and with extra nonsense!
A long time ago, you would have been able to buy a tupenny loaf of bread. And when I was young it was possible to buy a tupenn’orth of sweets (if you had the right ration coupons).
Those are standard English words. I only see three that I haven’t seen or heard used outside The Hobbit. I’d bet some English person will have seen or heard them used before.
I would presume Tolkien was drawing on the Old English word for “spider”, although the Danish etymology is probably very similar. Literally, it means “poison-head”, from the roots “[ae]tter” (“poison”) + “coppa” (“head”). Cite: Dictionary.die.net Shut Down
“Wuther” means “blow strongly” or “bluster” (in reference to the wind). It may be an alteration of “whither”. Given that, I would suggest that “bewuther” would mean something like “blown about” or “blown away”, possibly with a connotation of disorientation. Given the way Bilbo was being swept along by events at the time, this seems to make sense in context.
“Prosy” seems to clearly be a corruption of or derivation from “prosaic”.
“Noddy” means “simpleton” or “fool”, and may be derived from the sleep-related uses of “nod”. (This meaning is the root of the hacker jargon use of “noddy” to mean “trivially simple”.) “Tom” is simply a generic name for a boy or man, and makes similar appearances in “tomfool” and “tomboy”. “Tomnoddy” presumably carries much the same meaning as “tomfool”.
Tangent Re “Tuppence”: Does anyone else remember the song from the Disney Mary Poppins Movie “Feed the Birds”? It has the refrain…“Tuppence a Bag” and always pops into my head when I hear the word tuppence.
It’s not just a beer, it’s a type of beer: it’s akin to stout, very rich and dark. It’s not common these days, but it’s still made by some - mostly “boutique” - breweries: here in NZ Speights do an excellent porter.
When I was a kid, I thought they were singing “Tuffins a day”. I didn’t know what “tuffins” were, but from the fact that it sounds sort of like “muffins”, and the context, I figured it was some sort of biscuit or other breadstuff. What I couldn’t figure out was why in the world the children would be expected to put their tuffins in the bank, which even at that age I knew was for money.
And there’s a spider-like monster in D&D called an “ettercap”… I don’t know why I never made the connection before with “attercob”.
I remember when you could go out on a Saturday buy a suit and a pair of shoes, take your girl to the flicks,buy fish 'n chips afterwards and still have change out of a ha’penny
