Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2016 February 16

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February 16

Grossepelas

I have been approached by someone who has found the above word in parish registers under cause of death, and I must admit it has me stumped. Do any of you have any ideas? I did wonder if it had anything to do with syphilis? --TammyMoet (talk) 20:01, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

The second element "pelas" may mean 'skin' (as in Erysipelas), but I've got no clue what grosse- refers to here, unless it's actually Gross Disease (warning: gross), named after Samuel D. Gross. - Lindert (talk) 20:46, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

Erysipelas would be my first suggestion - G and E can look rather similar - but that condition is very rarely fatal. Tammy - do you have any information on the approximate age of the register entry? That might be helpful, as we could then consult some other contemporary records and see if anything's apparent. Tevildo (talk) 20:50, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

Apparently it's 1836. Am trying to get my friend to send me an image of the actual entry. --TammyMoet (talk) 16:24, 17 February 2016 (UTC)

I've had a look at some medical textbooks from that era, and erysipelas is quite frequenly listed as a cause of death, usually for very young children. That would be my suggestion. Tevildo (talk) 22:37, 20 February 2016 (UTC)

My usual source here finds nothing under that name. Matt Deres (talk) 16:59, 17 February 2016 (UTC)

I searched for "grossepelas" in the full OED Online. No hits. I then tried "pelas" on its own. It found a word "pela", but this is the same for a certain Chinese insect or the white wax that it secretes, so I don't think that's relevant. Of course if the word is badly misspelled this approach would not be helpful.
I googled for "grossepelas" and got 10 hits: one was this thread, and all of the others were in either German, French, or Portuguese. I did not try to figure one what they were about, but in every case "grosse" and "pelas" were separate words (or for the German hits, "pelas-" was actually the beginning of a longer word that happened to be hyphenated). I doubt that any of them are relevant either. --69.159.9.222 (talk) 00:46, 18 February 2016 (UTC) (by edit request) ―Mandruss ☎ 00:50, 18 February 2016 (UTC)