Also 8– womble. Now only colloq. or dial. [f. WAMBLE v.]
1. A rolling or uneasiness in the stomach; a feeling of nausea; spec. see quot. 1899.
1603. Holland, Plutarch’s Mor., IV. 701. Our meat going downe into the stomacke merily, and with pleasure, dissolveth incontinently all wambles.
1865. J. Sleigh, Derbysh. Gloss. (E.D.D.), Wamble, faintness.
1899. Syd. Soc. Lex., Wambles, an old popular term for Milk fever.
1902. C. N. & A. M. Williamson, Lightning Conductor, 48. There’s another thing which gives me the ‘wombles.’
† 2. An act of seething or bubbling up when brought to boiling-point. Obs. Cf. WALM sb.
1620. Venner, Via Recta, ii. 44. If you also boyle in it a quantity of ginger, three or foure wambles about,… it will be much the better.
1681. Sober Dial. betw. Stafford & the Lords, 2/2. [Stafford, as a ghost from Hell loq.] Here is a parcel of cold Comfort, but I fear me not enough to mitigate one wamble of the great Lake.
1730. W. Burdon, Gentl. Pocket-Farrier, 16. Set it on [the fire] again, and give it two or three Wambles.
3. An unsteady movement (of a person or thing); a roll of the body; a rolling or staggering gait. On or upon the wamble, staggering, wobbling.
1825. J. Wilson, Noct. Ambr., Wks. 1855, I. 7. When Knight’s Quarterly Magazine took a pain in its head, and gied a wamle ower the counter in the dead-thraws.
1881. Blackmore, Christowell, ii. The jump of the horse gave a jerk to the shaft, and this … gave a lollop to the near wheel, already on the wamble.
1887. [see SHAIL sb.2].
4. Comb.: wamble-cropped (now U.S.), † -stomached adjs., affected with nausea, sick (lit. and fig.).
1552. Huloet, *Wamble cropped, stomachichus.
a. 1610. Healey, Theophrastus (1616), 14. And yesterday, hee sayth, I was wamble-cropt, and (sauing your presence) parbrak’t.
1798. Massachusetts Spy, 5 Sept., 1/1. I feel a good deal womblecropped about dropping her acquaintance.
1836. Haliburton, Clockm., I. xxiii. It makes me so kinder wamblecropt, when I think on it, that I’m afeared to venture on matrimony at all.
1844. ‘J. Slick,’ High Life N. York, I. 44. I got back to the sloop and turned in awfully womblecropped.
1552. Huloet, *Wamble stomaked to be, nauseo.
