WAYZGOOSE/ˈweɪzɡuːs/

A printers’ annual dinner or excursion.

This was at one time the usual name for an entertainment given by a master printer to his workmen each year on or about St Bartholomew’s Day (24 August). This marked the traditional end of summer and the point at which the season began of having to work by candlelight at the end of the day. Later, the word came to refer to the annual outing and dinner of the staff of a printing works or the printers on a newspaper.

Its origin is unknown. However, the Oxford English Dictionary asserts that the older spelling is waygoose, the “z” having being added as a result of a mistaken etymology by the eighteenth-century lexicographer Nathaniel Bailey, and that it seems to have nothing to do with geese.

In particular, despite the entry in Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, the OED’s editors are sure that it is not a dialect term meaning “stubble-goose”, which was taken to be the crowning dish at the feast (though a goose might well have been served, as it often used to turn up around that time of year).

It’s not a term that appears much in literature, though a satirical poem by Roy Campbell entitled The Wayzgoose was published in 1928, and it is mentioned in a figurative way in Frank T Bullen’s The Cruise of the Cachalot of 1897: “Carriages were chartered, an enormous quantity of eatables and drinkables provided, and away we went, a regular wayzgoose or bean-feast party.”

It seemed at one point that with changes in printing technology and practice the term would die out, but I am told that events under this name are still held in Britain and the US, often as a deliberate reintroduction. It also turns up from time to time as a gently whimsical term for some anthology or book-related festivity.

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