grannum (gră’nŭm | græ’nʌm)

noun, plural grannums

informal: grandmother, old woman

origin: 18th century variation of grandam

Entick’s “New Spelling Dictionary” (1787)

• Grey as grannum’s cat (693) (Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia: Adagies and Proverbs; Wise Sentences and Witty Sayings, Ancient and Modern, Foreign and British, 1732)
• Teach your grannum to spin (4321) (Fuller, 1732)
• Teach your grannum to such eggs (4322) (Fuller, 1732)
• Teach your grannum (grandame) to suck eggs – a reproof to those, who think they have more knowledge than the whole world, and will be ever and anon teaching those who have had more Experience than themselves. (Nathan Bailey, George Gordon, Philip Miller, Thomas Lediard, Dictionarium Britannicum: Or, A More Compleat Universal Etymological English Dictionary Than Extant, 1736)
• Go and teach your grannum to crack filberts (Thomas George Smollett, The Adventures of Sir Lancelot Greaves, 1762)
• Grannum or Grandam – an old grandmother (Entick’s New Spelling Dictionary: Teaching to Write and Pronounce the English Tongue with Ease and Propriety. New edition by William Crakelt, 1787, p 170)
• Grannum’s gold – hoarded money: supposed to have belonged to the grandmother of the possessor (Francis Grose, Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, 1811)