For some reason, perhaps not too hard to guess, English has far more words to describe noisy gluttonous eating than dainty well-mannered eating. Of these dozen or so gluttonous words, slurp, first recorded in the mid seventeenth century, is the best known and the least offensive; you can safely chide your spouse for slurping his soup, and you can even refresh yourself afterwards with a Slurpee, a well-known drink of flavoured ice-crystals. In contrast, observe the reaction you elicit if you chide your spouse for globbing his soup, or try selling a drink named Globbee. The ugly glob and its equally ugly cousin, glop, both mean to swallow greedily; these two words are among the oldest of the “gluttony words,” having appeared in the mid fourteenth century. Glob and glop, like many gluttony words, developed from onomatopoeia: they sound like the action they describe. Ramp, gudge, yaffle, slummock—these four verbs also arose as imitations of loud chewing and swallowing sounds; if you say them out loud in succession, someone is sure to ask you what you are eating. Two of these words, gudge and yaffle, originated in the mid seventeenth century, a time when political upheaval prompted a laissez-faire attitude toward chewing with a closed mouth; ramp arose about a century before this, and slummock about a century after. Other “gluttony” words developed not from onomatopoeia but from older words. Guttle, for example, which was first recorded in the mid seventeenth century, derives from a fusion of gut and guzzle. In contrast, a classical source lies behind lurcate; that word, which means to eat ravenously, arose from the Latin lurcare, meaning to eat like a glutton.