Nesh

Son Huw has returned from the Middle East with Palestinian embroideries and Jordanian rugs and much else besides. He's glad to be home but the change in temperature had him climbing under his purchases in an attempt to get warm, attended by the watchful Dr Dog.

Where I come from, on the borders of Wales with Monmouthshire and Herefordshire, we'd say he was feeling nesh i.e. susceptible to the cold, and by extension, delicate or feeble. The term would typically be applied to animals as much as people, like a sickly lamb or a cat that hugged the hearth. It's a dialect word that has almost reached the mainstream as the very interesting Wikipedia entry explains. It was used by Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Hardy and D.H.Lawrence and even popped up in the film The Full Monty.

It was one of the words that featured in Thomas Hallam's 1885 monograph Four dialect words, clem, lake, nesh, and oss, their modern dialectal range, meanings, pronunciation, etymology, and early or literary use , a book I would dearly love to have, since I find these localized usages quite fascinating.

Anyone else out there know (or feel) nesh?

Edit: I've remembered that French has a word for someone who tends to feel the cold (a chilly morsel) frilieuse/frileux, alhough not as far as I know there is not an exact equivalent of nesh.