A mumblecrust is someone who has lost their teeth — someone who can only mumble a crust of bread, working it round with their gums.

The mumble here is the old eating sense, which Etymonline dates to the early 1300s — a little before the sense of speaking indistinctly. Green's Dictionary of Slang glosses it exactly that way: to chew softly, as with toothless gums. Put a crust in front of someone without teeth and that is what they are reduced to.

The word's first known appearance is on the stage. In Nicholas Udall's Ralph Roister Doister — one of the earliest English comedies, written around 1552 and published in 1567 — the heroine's old nurse is called Margerie Mumblecrust, Madge for short. Another of the household greets her by name: And howe doth our old beldame here, Mage Mumblecrust?

From there the name became a type. Green's has mother Mumble-crust in Thomas Dekker's Satiromastix in 1602 and in Middleton and Rowley's The Spanish Gypsy in 1623, both times as a jeer at an old woman. Its last example is from 1672.

So the word is Tudor and Stuart, not Victorian. And it is not kind. It belongs with the long list of old English names that made fun of women for growing old.

If you want to bring it back, the kind way is to aim it elsewhere: at a teething baby, say, or at yourself, leaving the dentist with half a face numb.