You’d think English would have a word, but I can’t think of one. Maybe there are dialect words around.
Nearest I can think of is “glory hole”, but I don’t think that has to be under the stairs.
The way our house is designed, there isn’t a c-u-t-s as such. What would be the cwtch opens out in the kitchen, and functions (not terribly well to be honest) as a pantry. The Welsh for pantry appears to be either bwtri (presumably related to English buttery), or the (fairly boring) pantri.
(Although both words have been in Welsh for a good long time, according to GPC).
We have a ‘wee room’ ever so tidy, for dog food, papers, things bought in bulk and waiting to be used, in season, mealworms for birds in a cupboard with postal stuff etc etc. Upstairs the spare room has bulky stuff like old microwaves and tvs waiting to go to recycling or the tip, empty big boxes in case the ex-contents fail a d need to be returned etc… My Auntie’s glory hole was her bedroom! My kitchen table is pretty close to being one!
I was surprised that there wasn’t a widely used different word for pantry - I read that the word, like buttery/bwtri originated from the store rooms in large houses and rich people adopting the norman-french etc, but surely small houses in wales also had their own words for little pantries back when - i grew up in a very old terrace of cottages and they all had pantries and they all had pig stys as well - all English words, yet the coal was stored in the coal cwt and the cupboard under the stairs was a cwtch. Cwtch is a multi-purpose word in my experience - you can obviously cwtch down as well, to make yourself small and just taking a nap could be having a cwtch (no need for cuddles, but obviously that’s the main one these days).
I’ve always thought of cubby-hole as quite a small space, just big enough for one item, kind of secret so the only person who knows where it is would be the person using it. Funny how perceptions come about - I must have read it in a novel and extrapolated from there - I would have been quite young…
I looked it up for a definitive definition. A small enclosed space, big enough for a child to be safely concealed, although it could be as big as a small room. Shades of the recent series “Gunpowder”, when two small boys were hidden in a wall behind some wood panelling? A child could be referred to as a cub… Mowgli was “The man-cub” in The Jungle Book. Hmm, nice to muse and make connections!
PS love your photo - we have a Westie and was momentarily thrown…
My favourite is cwts, which is how I was taught to spell it.
I appreciate that “cwtsh” is seen more often these days, but I don’t like as much.
In this season of goodwill, I will not express an opinion on the Anglicisation “cwtch”.
I have so many favourite Welsh words. One of the first I’ve learnt and still love for it’s simplicity and charm is isio. As for my most favourite, I’d say gwenwyn. Some time ago I fell in love with the word gwanwyn and - as a name nerd - thought it would be a great, a little hipster name for a child. Not mine of course, people in Poland would be really confused and it would be rather pretentious, but maybe for some book character or something… Then I found Swnami’s song called “Gwenwyn” and was like “Wow, this word is even better, it’s beautiful!”. I didn’t even check up what it means, though usually I do so immediately when I come across any beautiful word in any of my languages. I had it on my mind for some time thinking about it both as a word and as an interesting, female name with a Celtic vibe. Until I’ve found it means poison. So well, I guess it could only work as a name for a witch or something. But I still love the word soo much. And love that Swnami’s song.
