Joseph Wright meets the Boggart

In 1898, Joseph Wright dedicated almost a thousand words to boggart', a term for a supernatural entity, used in the north-west of England, in his Dialect Dictionary. While Wright's analysis of the word is by far the most thorough ever written, a careful survey of eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries' sources allows some extra senses and meanings to be teased out. We offer here a series of words and phrases that Wright covered but where the range of meanings was demonstrably wider than those that Wright suggested: e.g. boggart stones', to take (the) boggart'. There are also lexical items that Wright had never heard of: e.g. boggart chair' and boggart meat'. The article concludes with a brief section on boggart sayings and, finally, the question of whether the use of boggart' in dialect can help us understand boggart folklore.