Wud

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. Chiefly in Scots, describing a person who is mad, raging or wildly out of control
2. An old Scots adjective meaning insane, frenzied or furiously angry in temper or behaviour
3. Used in Scottish dialect to describe someone driven to madness or uncontrolled rage

Etymology: "Wud" is a variant spelling of "wood" that signals a particular pronunciation: the vowel is shortened and the final consonant is dropped or clipped, so the word sounds like the spelling. The spelling appears most often in dialogue and informal writing, where it records how the word is spoken rather than how it is standardly written. The standard form "wood" comes from Old English "wudu", which goes back to a Germanic root meaning forest or wood. Its older senses covered both a collection of trees and the timber cut from them, a double meaning that survives in modern usage. The spelling "wud" belongs to a long tradition of phonetic spellings that imitate speech, a practice that became especially common in nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction and comic writing.