Fussick

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. To move about in an agitated or nervous manner ; to look through or hunt around in a place without care or order
2. To squirm or fidget with anxious energy ; to rummage through things in search of something specific or without particular purpose
3. To behave in a restless and fretful way ; to poke around or sift through a collection or space in a casual searching manner

Etymology: In the Australian and New Zealand goldfields, the search itself was the point. Prospectors without a claim of their own worked over ground that others had abandoned, scraping through tailings and crevices for leftover gold. That activity gave Australian and New Zealand English a verb for rummaging, and "fussick" is a spelling variant of the more common "fossick." The verb's ancestry is uncertain. It is generally linked to older British dialect senses of "fossick," meaning to busy oneself with trifles or work in an ineffectual, fussy way. That fits the picture of a prospector patiently picking through debris, but dictionaries do not settle whether the gold-field sense grew from the dialect word or arrived separately, so the connection is best treated as plausible rather than proven. The related adjective "fussy," meaning overly particular, comes from "fuss," a separate formation.