A dialectal or regional term for white mustard seeds or the mustard plant itself.
From Old English and Germanic roots, possibly related to 'canker' but more directly from plant naming traditions in rural British dialects, where 'caunch' referred to wild mustard growing as a weed or cultivated crop.
This wonderfully obscure word survives mainly in East Anglian dialects, where farmers still recognized caunch as a crop that could enrich soil—it's a linguistic fossil showing how regional plant names were crucial before standardized agricultural terminology.
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