gound

English

Alternative forms

• gund (dialectal)

Etymology

From Middle English gounde, gownde, from Old English gund (“matter, pus, poison”), from Proto-West Germanic *gund, from Proto-Germanic *gundaz (“sore, boil”), from Proto-Indo-European *gʰendʰ- (“ulcer, sore, abscess, boil”). Cognate with Old High German gunt (“purulent matter”), dialectal Norwegian gund (“the scab of an ulcer”).

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /ˈɡaʊnd/
• Rhymes: -aʊnd
• Homophone: gowned

Noun

gound (uncountable)

1. (UK dialectal) Mucus produced by the eyes during sleep.
   • 2002, Peter Novobatzky, Ammon Shea, Depraved and Insulting English:

     Typical terms invented to fill this vacuum include sleepies, eye-snot, and bed-boogers. The correct word, however, is gound. "Collin was never one to dillydally in the morning: by the time he had rubbed the gound out of his eyes he was usually on his third Manhattan."

   • 2004, Bart King, Chris Sabatino, The Big Book of Boy Stuff:

     Your eyes get dried mucus in them while you sleep. The stuff is sometimes called bed-boogers or eye-snot, but to be accurate, it is "gound".

   • 2016, Darla Duhaime, Gross Body Stuff, page 16:

     Your eyes have their own goo, too. You know that crud in the corners of your eyes when you first wake up? It's a type of rheum called gound. When you're awake, you blink away the gound.

   • 2017, Carol Ann Rinzler, Spare Parts: In Praise of Your Appendix and Other Unappreciated Organs:

     While you sleep, however, your rheum bundles detritus such as dust, blood cells, skin cells, and mucus into gound, the gummy yellow-y stuff sometimes known as “sleep” […]

2. (UK dialectal) Gummy matter in sore eyes.

Synonyms

• See synonyms at sleep.

Derived terms

• goundy

Related terms

• red-gum

Translations

mucus produced by the eyes during sleep — see sleep

References

• William Dwight Whitney, Benjamin E[li] Smith, editors (1911), “gound”, in The Century Dictionary […], New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., →OCLC.
• Wright, Joseph (1900), The English Dialect Dictionary‎, volume 2, Oxford: Oxford University Press, page 692

Anagrams

• Duong, undog, ungod