I came across in the Times "Word watch" (Times 2, 01/05/25). According to the OED it originally meant "an idler who stares at length at activity on a canal", and by extension someone who stares at anything for a long time.
The OED classifies it as a dialect word and cites the Glossary to Bradshaw's Canals & Navigable Rivers Eng. & Wales (1904), which suggests a Lake District origin. Here is the entry, which I located with the help of Google Books
I thought I'd see if I could find out more about the origin, so I tried asking DeepSeek AI and it suggested the first print appearance as being in "The Folk-Speech of South Cheshire" by Egerton Leigh. This seemed promising! After some digging I located such a book and was getting quite excited - but alas! gongoozler was not there, DeepSeek was wrong.
The OED's summary is that the word of unknown origin, but does offer a tantalising third possibility –
An Unusual Word - Gongoozler
I came across in the Times "Word watch" (Times 2, 01/05/25). According to the OED it originally meant "an idler who stares at length at activity on a canal", and by extension someone who stares at anything for a long time.
The OED classifies it as a dialect word and cites the Glossary to Bradshaw's Canals & Navigable Rivers Eng. & Wales (1904), which suggests a Lake District origin. Here is the entry, which I located with the help of Google Books
I thought I'd see if I could find out more about the origin, so I tried asking DeepSeek AI and it suggested the first print appearance as being in "The Folk-Speech of South Cheshire" by Egerton Leigh. This seemed promising! After some digging I located such a book and was getting quite excited - but alas! gongoozler was not there, DeepSeek was wrong.
The OED's summary is that the word of unknown origin, but does offer a tantalising third possibility –
"... compare Lincolnshire dialect gawn ‘stare vacantly or curiously’, gooze (also goozen) ‘stare aimlessly, gape’."
– and perhaps that's the best guess we have.