ammil

AM-il

The sparkle of morning sunlight through hoar-frost on leaves and grasses. A word for a phenomenon that lasts only minutes — the moment when frozen dew catches the first light before it melts.

Etymology

Exmoor English dialect. Henry Williamson used it in Tarka the Otter (1927): "Moor-folk call this morning glory the Ammil."

Notes

Robert Macfarlane, in Landmarks: “Many of these terms have mingled oddness and familiarity in the manner that Freud calls uncanny: peculiar in their particularity, but recognizable in that they name something conceivable, if not instantly locatable. Ammil is a Devon term meaning ‘the sparkle of morning sunlight through hoar-frost’, a beautifully exact word for a fugitive phenomenon I have several times seen but never before been able to name. ”