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:
DUDGEON
We are so accustomed to encountering people who indulge in their sense of aggrievement or angry resentfulness, their ill humor or spite, that an ordinary word for it, dudgeon (pronounced DUDJ-un), seems insufficient, so we use the stock phrase in high dudgeon.
The word has been around for some time. The OED has a citation from 1576, "Who seem'd to take it in marvelus great duggin." But the etymology is obscure. There is a separate word dudgeon for a kind of wood used in the handles of knives and daggers, but it appears to be unrelated. There is also an obsolete word, dudgen," "trash," or "mean," "poor," contemptible," that may perhaps be related. No one can be sure.
Example: From Winston Groom's "Sherman's Folly at Shiloh" in the Quarterly Journal of Military Hisotry, Spring 2012: "As the soldiers began to fall in and Peabody called for his horse, Prentiss reappeared in a cloud of dust and high dudgeon."