This evening the twitter celebrity @MooseAllain retweeted mainly English, particularly Wessex/Cornwall, regional names for woodlice. They are amazing. I have tried to make a map of the results. The word sizes are chosen to make the words fit and the locations are approximate and I just couldn’t get “Snarly-Grocklemice” to fit in Cornwall. Outside the map, slaters is apparently also common in Northern Ireland and clocks elsewhere in Ireland and they are called potato bugs in Canada and rolly pollys or pill bugs in the US.
The tweets have now been storified:
http://storify.com/mooseallain/pea-bugs-slater-and-monkey-pigs
[The word “bishy barnabee”, from Norfolk, has been removed; it seems it is actually a local word for ladybird
http://www.norfolkdialect.com/glossary01.htm
and has an amusing etymology
http://www.macmillandictionaryblog.com/a-guddle-through-the-dialectal-wordbank
(Thanks for @stancarey and @boswellaffleck for this last bit).]
