In American English “scrumptious” means something delicious. It comes from regional dialects in England in the early 1800s, and originally it meant something quite different. Edward Moor’s 1823 “Suffolk Words and Phrases” includes this definition: “shrewing, stingy, in an avaricious sense.”
When “scrumptious” crossed the Atlantic, it took on a new meaning, but still nothing to do with its current usage. In 1834 Sydney Smith wrote “Life A. Jackson”, including: “An affair requirin so much dexterity, every scrimptius bit on’t havin tu be worked with master skill.” “Scrimptius” here seems to be a variation of “scrumptious,” and its meaning in the US in those days was “tiny” or “very small.”
But then in 1845 Slyvester Judd wrote “Margaret: A Tale of the Real and Ideal, Blight and Bloom,” and included “scrumptious” with yet another meaning: particular or fastidious: “I don’t mean to be scrumptious about it, Judge, but I do want to be a man, if I..haven’t so much eddecation as the rest of you.”
“Scrumptious” somehow then began to drift toward what we know today. In 1830 it was already used to mean stylish: “The General Court..all had their hats off, and looking pretty scrumpscious, you may depend.” That continued and drifted toward “attractive,” as in the 1865 “Rhoda Fleming”: “Hang me, if ever I see such a scrumptious lot.” Then by 1894 usage had begun to include food: “The cake was scrumptious.”
The origin of “scrumptious”, keeping in mind that the oldest usage that’s been found meant “stingy,” probably comes from “scrimp.” Today to “scrimp” means to be economical or at least careful with your resources, and as early as the 1600s the word existed in that sense — and also meant to deprive someone else of something: “He hath been scrimp’d and suppress’d by his Fathers Greatness and Authority.”
“Scrimp” didn’t turn into “scrumptious” all in one go; there’s a word in British English that bridges the gap: “scrump.” “Scrump” is a verb with an oddly specific meaning: to steal apples from an orchard. Tom Holt used it in his 2005 book “Earth, Air, Fire, and Custard:” “He sighed, more in sorrow than in anger; in fact there was hardly any anger at all, like vermouth in a really dry martini. God probably sighed like that when he looked at the tree and saw that someone had been scrumping apples.”
“Scrumping” is occasionally used for any sort of stealing, as it was in “Personal Computer World” in 2004: “When wireless networking first kicked off in the corporate world a couple of years ago, I honestly thought the concept of loitering outside with a Wifi portable, scrumping for free access would be incredibly short-lived.” But “scrumping” as an all-purpose synonym for taking something not yours that is also not apples, hasn’t caught on very widely.
There is, however, “scrumpy,” a British English word for a “cheap and rough” kind of apple cider. Scrumpy has a high alcohol content, and evidently it’s traditionally pretty awful. It’s been described as “squeal-pig cider” because that’s the noise you’d make if you tried it, and an old saying from Herefordshire about scrumpy is “It used to take three people to swallow a mug of it. One to drink and the other two to hold him upright.” In other words, scrumpy is not at all scrumptious. ivakiv
