From 1687: “With what a rueful Phis and maine.” From 1714: “Fizle’s Phiz always gives me the Chollick.” From 1827: “And deem themselves of admirable fiz.”From 1903: “…the drollest phiz in dogdom.” From 1997: “…replaced with the phiz of his supposedly brain-dead nemesis.”
What we have here is a word (“phiz”) that was in pretty common use for several centuries, and recently seems to have completely vanished. At least in the US; reportedly it’s still to be heard in England. “Phiz,” which has also been spelled quite a few different ways, is a shortening of “physiognomy.” The longer word is borrowed from French, originated in Latin, and means the study of appearance, or more specifically the face. And a “phiz” (or a “fiz” or a “phyz” or even sometimes “fizzog”) means “face.”
It was slangy, but also accepted as a legitimate word — the poet Carl Sandburg used it in his 1922 book “Slabs of the Sunburnt West,” for example. You can also find it used in the “New York Literary Gazette” in the 1800s and the “drollest phiz in dogdom,” above, comes from Helen Keller’s “My Life.”
“Phiz” disappeared quite abruptly, as language changes go. It was common enough in 1997 that “Entertainment Weekly” assumed its readers would know it — but now, just a couple of decades later, the word is listed as obsolete. On the phiz of it, that’s quite a puzzle.
