Each week The Sun's John McIntyre presents a relatively obscure but evocative word with which you may not be familiar, another brick to add to the wall of your vocabulary. This week's word:
CHUNTER
A chiefly British word, chunter (pronounced CHUN-tur) means to mutter or murmur, or to make a low rumbling noise. It can also mean to grumble, find fault, and complain. The etymologists suggest that the origin is an imitation of the sound.
Chunter doesn't appear in the Corpus of Contemporary American English at all, but the lexicographers at Webster's New World Dictionary saw fit to include it. And thus it became an entry in the electronic dictionary in The Sun's editing system. And thus, when a copy editor carelessly applied auto-correct to an article mentioning Kunta Kinte's arrival in Annapolis, the software, supplying the nearest words to the ones it did not recognize, rendered Kunta Kinte as Chunter Knit.
I wrote the correction the next day, and chunter remains lodged in my memory.
Example: From Nevil Shute's On the Beach (1957): "The baby stirred, and started chuntering and making little whimpering noises."